Former Zambia Leader Is Acquitted
JOHANNESBURG — Frederick Chiluba, the former president of Zambia whose government became internationally notorious for corruption during his years in office, was acquitted Monday on charges of stealing about $500,000 from the state.
Frederick Chiluba, former president of Zambia, at his Lusaka home after his acquittal in a corruption case on Monday.
A magistrate in the Zambian capital, Lusaka, ruled that the prosecution had failed to prove its case against Mr. Chiluba, a former trade unionist who governed Zambia for a decade, but it convicted two businessmen, Faustin Kabwe and Aaron Chungu, of theft. Mr. Chiluba’s wife, Regina, was convicted on corruption charges this year and sentenced to three and a half years in prison.
Mr. Chiluba celebrated his acquittal, declaring at a news conference at his home, “For eight long years, the devil has tried to put the stigma of a thief on me, but God has dealt with the devil.”
Even as the former president held forth at his home, prosecutors conferred about the grounds on which they would appeal the ruling to Zambia’s High Court. Maxwell Nkole, who leads Zambia’s anticorruption task force, said that he was disappointed about Mr. Chiluba’s acquittal, but that he took some solace in the convictions of the other two men.
“The very fact that they were able to prosecute a former head of state sets a very important precedent,” he said.
But anticorruption groups and advocates in Zambia and abroad took a bleaker view of Mr. Chiluba’s acquittal, describing it as a serious setback to efforts to halt the theft of public resources by governing elites and a disappointing example of faltering national prosecutions of graft that stretch from Latin America to Africa and Asia.
“This is part of a pattern we’re seeing around the world, that national jurisdictions are incapable of dealing with grand corruption cases that go to the heart of the political establishment,” said Helen Garlick, who was head of the overseas corruption unit in the British Serious Fraud Office until last year. “We need to think of ways of taking these cases outside national jurisdictions.”
Mr. Chiluba, who was Zambia’s president from 1991 to 2002, still faces a 2007 London civil court judgment that he owes his country $57 million for spending money from a secret intelligence agency account that was found to have been set up mainly to steal government money. Mr. Chiluba is contesting the ruling.
The judge in the London case, Peter Smith, found that Mr. Chiluba spent more than $500,000 in a single Geneva boutique on a lavish array of designer suits, handmade shoes and silk pajamas, despite an annual salary of about $10,000.
The case in which Mr. Chiluba was acquitted Monday involved another set of expenditures.
Mr. Chiluba had maintained in unsworn testimony before the Lusaka magistrate, Jones Chinyama, that he had never stolen public money. Instead, he said, funds donated to his political campaigns by corporate interests and other supporters had been deposited in the secret account.
Mr. Nkole, of the anticorruption task force, said the magistrate told the prosecution it should have summoned the former intelligence chief, Xavier Chungu, to testify about whether it was public money that Mr. Chiluba spent, or money donated to his campaigns that was commingled in the secret account.
Mr. Nkole said the prosecution had not summoned Mr. Chungu to the stand in part because it viewed him as an accomplice whose testimony would only have damaged the case. “He was totally unreliable,” Mr. Nkole said.
Mr. Chungu was also found liable for the $57 million in the London case.
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