John Deasy (Waterford, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Mr. Cooney and his officials here this morning. I will go straight into the interim report on Uganda and the €4 million that was misappropriated. I understand that the money will be in our account within the next couple of days, which is good news. I do understand that this affair has had a profound impact politically and otherwise in Uganda. It is fair to say that the auditor general there did his job. Civil society played its part in uncovering this and there has been a significant fallout, not just here and not just in Uganda but with the other donors. They followed our lead in the aftermath of the situation. The individuals responsible for implementing the controls bypassed key controls and there was massive collusion, not just in political circles but with the Bank of Uganda. On the donor side, controls were not applied, which made the fraud easier.

Section 4 of the report states that in cases of payment made to the Ugandan Government in 2010 and 2011, in some instances receipts were not on file. Irish Aid financial regulations require that a receipt be retained but are not adequately specific on the level of detail required. Ideally a receipt should detail any subsequent transfer of funds to specific accounts. The obvious question for this committee is how that happened. How is it that receipts were not on file? How is it that receipts did not detail subsequent transfers of funds? Has Irish Aid checked the other programme countries to see whether that was standard practice or whether it was isolated in Uganda since the situation there came to light?