Nyarugenge Intermediate court yesterday overturned the two-year jail sentence that a lower court had given to former parliamentarian Munyanganizi Bikoro, reducing it to one year.

Bikoro who is also a former State Minister for Environment, Mining and Natural Resources, had appealed an earlier ruling by the Kagarama Primary court which had convicted him of corruption and complicity in evasion of state taxes.

Presided over by Judge Harrison Mutabazi, the Nyarugenge court acquitted the embattled former senior government official and his two accomplices of corruption but found him guilty of complicity in tax evasion.

Together with the two accomplices, Bikoro was accused of having diverted tiles meant for a water purification project to a house he was constructing.

The Spaniard, Luis Duenas Herrera was the head of Espina Obras Hidraulicas, a water purifying company that had been contracted by the government, and it was alleged that Bikoro imported the tiles through the company which had been exempted of taxes on materials imported to work on the project.

Mutabazi ruled that there was no concrete evidence attesting to the fact that the trio engaged in corruption thereby reducing all their sentences to one year.

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