THE LOOTING OF KENYA

· Leak of secret report exposes corrupt web
· More than £1bn moved to 28 countries
· Property in London, New York , Australia

 The former Kenyan president Daniel Arap Moi. Photograph: Juda Ngwenya/Reuters

The breathtaking extent of corruption perpetrated by the family of the former Kenyan leader Daniel Arap Moi was exposed last night in a secret report that laid bare a web of shell companies, secret trusts and frontmen that his entourage used to funnel hundreds of millions of pounds into nearly 30 countries including Britain.

The 110-page report by the international risk consultancy Kroll, seen by the Guardian, alleges that relatives and associates of Mr Moi siphoned off more than £1bn of government money. If true, it would put the Mois on a par with Africa's other great kleptocrats, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) and Nigeria's Sani Abacha.

The assets accumulated included multimillion pound properties in London, New York and South Africa, as well as a 10,000-hectare ranch in Australia and bank accounts containing hundreds of millions of pounds.

The report, commissioned by the Kenyan government, was submitted in 2004, but never acted upon. It details how:

· Mr Moi's sons - Philip and Gideon - were reported to be worth £384m and £550m respectively;

· His associates colluded with Italian drug barons and printed counterfeit money;

· His clique owned a bank in Belgium;

· The threat of losing their wealth prompted threats of violence between Mr Moi's family and his political aides;

· £4m was used to buy a home in Surrey and £2m to buy a flat in Knightsbridge.

Kroll said last night it could not confirm or deny the authenticity of the report.

The Kroll investigation into the former regime was commissioned by President Mwai Kibaki shortly after he came to power on an anti-corruption platform in 2003. It was meant to be the first step towards recovering some of the money stolen during Mr Moi's 24-year rule, which earned Kenya the reputation as one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

But soon after the investigation was launched, Mr Kibaki's government was caught up in its own scandal, known as Anglo Leasing, which involved awarding huge government contracts to bogus companies.

Since then, none of Mr Moi's relatives or close allies has been prosecuted. No money has been recovered. Three of the four ministers who resigned after the Anglo Leasing scandal was exposed have since been reinstated.

Last night, the Kenyan government confirmed that it received the Kroll report in April 2004. But Alfred Mutua, the government spokesman, said it was incomplete and inaccurate, and that Kroll had not been engaged to do any further work.

"We did not find that the report was credible. It was based a lot on hearsay." He said the leaking of the report was politically motivated and insisted Kenya was working with foreign governments to recover the stolen money. "Some of the money is in UK bank accounts. We have asked the British government to help us recover the funds, but so far they have refused."

The report was obtained by the website Wikileaks, which aims to help expose corruption. The document is believed to have been leaked by a senior government official upset about Mr Kibaki's failure to tackle corruption and by his alliance with Mr Moi before the presidential election in December.

On Tuesday Mr Moi said he was backing Mr Kibaki for a second term, saying he was disappointed that "selfish individual interests have been entrenched in our society". Mr Moi remains an influential figure in Kenya and his endorsement is expected to go some way to ensuring his successor's re-election.

In the Kroll report the investigators allege that a Kenyan bank was the key to getting vast sums of money of out of the country via its foreign currency accounts. The same bank had already laundered $200m (£100m) on behalf of the late Mr Abacha, with the assistance of a Swiss-based "financier".

"It is believed that twice as much was laundered through the same system by the Mois," the report said.

Kroll confirmed last night that it had previously done work for the Kenyan government. A company spokesman was given extracts of the report seen by the Guardian. "We cannot confirm or deny that this report is what it purports to be," he said. "Nor can we talk about the scope, content or results of any work we have done for the government of Kenya, which remains confidential."

Gideon Moi is an MP and Philip Moi is a businessman. Daniel Arap Moi's spokesman did not return calls last night.

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'Most devastating plague of locusts' in recent history could come within weeks, U.N. warns

Feb. 9, 2020, 5:48 PM CET

By The Associated Press

Young locusts jump in the air near Garowe, Somalia, on Feb. 5, 2020.Ben Curtis / AP

GAROWE, Somalia — At a glance, the desert locusts in this arid patch of northern Somalia look less ominous than the billion-member swarms infesting East Africa in the worst outbreak some places have seen in 70 years.

But their time will come. 

Climate change and al-Shabab extremists contributed to circumstances that could produce crippling swarms of locusts in Somalia and East Africa.

Small and wingless, the hopping young locusts are the next wave in the outbreak that threatens more than 10 million people across the region with a severe hunger crisis.

And they are growing up in one of the most inaccessible places on the planet. Large parts of Somalia south of this semi-autonomous Puntland region are under threat, or held by, the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab extremist group. That makes it difficult or impossible to conduct the aerial spraying of the locusts that experts say is the only effective control.

Somalia has declared the outbreak a national emergency. Across the region, it has the potential “to be the most devastating plague of locusts in any of our living memories if we don't reduce the problem faster than we're doing at the moment,” U.N. humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock said.

As an armed Somali policeman stood by, experts on Thursday walked across the dry land crawling with the young locusts and explained the threat to come if the world doesn’t act right now.

“The world needs to know this is where it all begins,” said Alberto Trillo Barca, a spokesman for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. “In the next three or four weeks, these nymphs, as we call them, will develop wings.”

Then they are expected to set off for neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia, where a handful of planes spraying pesticide can only do so much if such swarms keep arriving.

Climate experts have pointed to unusually heavy rains, aided by a powerful cyclone off Somalia in December, as a major factor in the outbreak. The locusts were carried in by the storm’s winds from the Arabian Peninsula and parts beyond, and now they are feeding on Somalia's fresh vegetation.

With more rains expected in the region in the coming weeks, the number of locusts if unchecked could grow by up to 500 times by June, when drier weather is expected.

But that drier weather is not necessarily the solution, said Dominique Burgeon, the FAO’s emergency and resilience director.

The density of the locusts is now so high that even normal moisture can lead to another generation, he said.

“We cannot believe in Mother Nature to solve it,” he explained.

Without enough spraying to stop the swarms, the already worrying outbreak could turn into a plague, “and when you have a plague, it takes years to control,” he said.

Against that sweeping outlook, a few masked workers with white protective suits and pesticide containers strapped to their backs stood in the camel-crossed Somali desert, spritzing the thousands of locusts clinging to thorny bushes.

The world's changing climate brings the risk of more cyclones coming in from the warming Indian Ocean off East Africa, climate experts say. With that, the likelihood of further locust outbreaks grows.

The “sort of new normal,” Burgeon said.

And that means Kenya, Ethiopia and other East African countries that rarely see such outbreaks and found themselves largely unprepared for this one could join “frontline countries” in parts of West Africa and the Middle East, experts say. Those countries have well-trained monitoring and prevention systems in place for more frequent locust outbreaks.

The FAO has asked international donors to give $76 million immediately to help control this outbreak. So far $19 million is in hand, Burgeon said.

“The biggest challenge is the scale of the breeding, as you can see all around us,” Barca said. These locusts, he said, will be migrating to southern Somalia and parts of Kenya and Ethiopia just as crops are germinating there.

“If at that time there are huge quantities of locusts around, it will have a devastating impact on the crops,” Burgeon said.

Other East African countries including South Sudan, Eritrea and Djibouti are also at risk, Burgeon said. Millions of people in some of these places are already facing hunger in the wake of civil war or more common challenges such as poverty.

Locusts began to arrive Sunday in Uganda, reaching a village near the Kenyan border, according to Martin Owor, the country's commissioner in charge of disaster preparedness.

The swarm spotted in Amudat district was “certainly big,” and the prime minister was expected to lead an evening emergency meeting on Uganda's first major locust outbreak since the 1960s, Owor said.

Here in rural Somalia, where about 50% of the people depend on animals for their livelihoods, the locusts are eating the pasturage. The animals weaken, their milk decreases and small children, who depend on the milk to survive, suffer skyrocketing malnutrition, the experts said.

Those fighting the locust outbreak may try to negotiate with Somalia's extremist fighters to allow spraying in rural areas where they are active, Burgeon said. Already emergency workers are going in where they can.

In a few weeks the young locusts will shed their skin, said Keith Cressman, a senior locust forecasting officer with the FAO.

“It takes a few days to warm up their wings,” he said. Some test flights follow and they’re on the move.

The locusts at that stage are bright pink and in their most voracious state, like "very hungry teenagers,” Cressman said. By now, many people in Kenya and Ethiopia know them well.

After a month or so, the locusts will be mature adults, ready to reproduce.

Soon after copulating and laying eggs the locusts will die, “but their progeny will be hatching,” Cressman said. “And we have another generation of locusts to contend with, with about another 20-fold increase.”

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