Civil servants fleece treasury

PANA reported that Malawi's director of public prosecutions accused civil servants of stealing at least a third of the country's budgetary allocation every year.

Citing obsolete accounting systems in most government departments, the director, Farhad Assani said: "This is very fertile and tempting ground for fraud since the manual data can easily be altered or simply misplaced."

Assani added that he suspects that people in the treasury connive with people in the audit department to ignore impropriety in monetary transactions, losing the cash-strapped government millions in unaccounted for money. Most of the money is allegedly stolen through issuing inflated cheques when paying for government work, with officials pocketing the difference once the cheques have been cashed.