Over Rwf 845 million has been reported missing from cooperative societies, reveals the first quarter audit. It adds that 10 cooperatives out of the 600 scrutinized so far have bad accounts.

Vincent Rutaremara, the Director of Cooperatives and Inspection unit, in Rwanda Cooperative Agency (RCA), said that the cooperatives were also found to be poorly managed.
The missing funds are the share capitals of the members.

Rutaremara was non-committal on the identity of the cited cooperatives, saying that he wouldn’t want to jeopardize investigations currently being carried out by the prosecution.

He however, highlighted lack of training for cooperatives’ managers as one of the challenges they face.

"We performed our duty and all what is remaining depends on the prosecution,” Rutaremara said.

When contacted for comment, prosecution spokesperson, Augustin Nkusi said that all the cases are on trial.

"All people cited in this scam were arrested and some of them have appeared in court,” Nkusi said without mentioning the number of those arrested.

However he mentioned CODERVAM (Nyagatare), Twibumbe Cooperative (Rwamagana) and CODACE (Kigali) as some of the cooperatives whose leaders have already appeared in court.

The board chairman of Twibumbe Cooperative, Joseph Sematama, appeared in court to answer charges of swindling Rwf 350m from the cooperative’s coffers.  

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