After
reading in the media about the so-called mysterious jet which
is flying the State President around, we carried our own very
careful investigations. We were greatly shocked to find out that
it is the same former Malawi Government plane which was
flying Late Bingu around.
It is the very plane that President Joyce Banda swore to the
Malawi nation and the world at large that she would never fly
in.
She in fact urged her Government officials to sell this plane
very quickly, telling us that she does not need it. She assured
us all that she would be using commercial flights. We are now
forced to conclude that all this was deliberate misinformation.
There must have been some underground deals with the buyer
of the plane, such as being assured of some favors, material or
otherwise, or being allowed to fly in the plane afterwards in
return for favorable transactions in the sale.
We now know that the plane was sold to a company called
Bohnox Enterprise Limited. Although this company is
registered in the Virgin Islands, the owner, a Mr Ivor
Ischikowitz, is a resident of South Africa.
He also owns Paramount Group, a company which deals in
military hardware and it is registered in South Africa. This is
the company which paid for the UK PR firm which came to
Malawi to clean up the President’s image in the face of
Cashgate scandal.
In addition, this is the same company that sold us seven gun
boats to patrol over Lake Malawi soon after our lake dispute
with Tanzania started.
The ‘Sold’ Presidential Jet
We all remember how the State House chose to hide the source
of funding for the UK PR firm. The revelations came from an
overseas publication. Now the same State House is being very
tongue tied about the secret well-wisher who is providing this
mysterious plane for the President to fly around.
We worried then about how the Paramount Group funded the
PR firm and why the State House wanted to hide it all. This is
obviously because we know that there is a high propensity for
bribes, corruption, and fraud in sales and transactions of
military hardware worldwide. We were somewhat relieved
when we read that President Joyce Banda has terminated her
contract with the UK PR firm even if this may have been done
in order to avoid the discovery of more irregularities in the
deal.
We now would like to leave it up to the Malawi public to figure
out why a South African resident should use a Virgin Island
registered company to buy a plane from the Malawi
Government, paint it differently and change its registration
number, keep it in South Africa, and clandestinely fly the
President of Malawi around the globe in that plane.
This situation is made more troublesome by the fact that the
State House still wants to keep all these facts secret from the
Malawi public. They cannot somehow learn from the PR firm
fiasco.
We also hear that this is the same company which leased
Mbalachanda Estate from ADMARC and also owns Engen Oil
Company in Malawi. We now must ask ourselves that with
such level of presence in Malawi, how many other secret deals
is the PP Government making with this company?
To what extent is the company willing to go to fund the
cleaning up the Government image in the face of scandals like
Cashgate?
Can this Government assure us that there are no elements of
Cashgate in its dealings with this company that may show up
elsewhere like in the on-going forensic audit? In short, is
Paramount Group not another Cashgate company?