By Arret Jatta
Musa Bah, a former deputy mayor of KMC, reappeared before the commission to continue his testimony yesterday focusing on the honorariums paid to councilors before the Muslim festive period which the commission believes were done without ‘proper inspection’.
“The information we have is that during Muslim festive period, the council organises trainings with the main purpose of allocating monies to councilors so that they can have money to spend for this fective season. Is that correct?” Lead Counsel Patrick Gomez asked the witness.
He replied: “Well, all I know is that we have been conducting trainings and exercises but to say it’s specifically for a feast or something, I don’t know”.
Lead Counsel Gomez further asked him if he remembers that there were councilors said to have embarked on 24-25 days exercise and were paid D10,000 each including Mayor Talib Bensouda.
“Yes, I could recall, we conducted an exercise,” Bah said.
“Now was this exercise sanctioned by the council?” Counsel Patrick asked. The witness replied, “yes”.
He was later shown vouchers from the council dated 9 August 2018 .
“Do you confirm whether this exercise took place before you passed a resolution to pay all these councilors D10,000 including the mayor?” Counsel Gomez further asked the witness.
“You know normally, resolutions are reviewed after a subsequent meeting and adopted; probably it could
be the time that I have signed,” he responded.
“I’m not saying that the resolution is unlawful, my point is you were in a position and you are in position to tell us about this payment because you signed it, you took part in the deliberation to pay all the councilors, to pay yourself D10,000 each, which was done without proper inspection. There were no verification of this exercise, we are even doubtful whether it even happened. The chairman of the committee testified and said clearly that all these signatures happened in one day,” Counsel told the witness.
“Yes, if at all, it is the last one, that one yes,” the witness said.
He added that it (the resolution) was brought to him to sign but he can’t tell if everyone signed the same day.
