Nairobi Governor Mike Sonko was yesterday grilled by EACC officials over graft-related activities in multi-million garbage and waste disposal tenders.
The governor arrived at the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission offices at 7.30am.
He was accompanied by his lawyer Cecil Miller, a number of Nairobi MCAs and supporters to respond to audit queries raised by the commission.
“The tender for one company is around Sh200 million per year but being the county CEO, I do not sit in the environmental department committee and so I do not know what happens in those offices,” Sonko told reporters at Integrity House after he was questioned about the 13 companies that won the tender.
“A few mistakes, which might not be good, might have happened in those offices during the tendering process.”
The investigations were initiated after the county assembly’s Public Accounts Committee revealed that officials at City Hall’s Environment department could not account for more than Sh160 million that was paid to companies contracted to collect garbage.
As a result, director of investigations Abdi Mohamud wrote to the governor summoning him to Integrity Centre last Friday.
“I received the letter but I was not around. I was in Dubai but I had to cut short my trip and come back,” Sonko said at 3pm after his date with the anti-graft agency detectives.
EACC officials told the Star that they were investigating claims of corruption in the award of tenders in 2017-18 and 2018-19.
“You can even see some of the tenders go back to April before I took office. And some company was being paid as much as Sh300 million to collect garbage and dispose of other waste from the Central Business District,” the governor said.
He declined to renew the contracts of officials involved in the tendering process after making this discovery, he said.
“The CEC for Environment and other senior officers are at home if the EACC is ready to interrogate them,” he said.
