The US department of treasury has issued new sanctions against three officials of the Democratic Republic of Congo electoral commission, Ceni.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These sanctions relate to the two-year delay in holding general elections originally scheduled in 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It comes a month after a visa ban was announced against the same officials and other high-profile members of former President Joseph Kabila’s government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The US says that under Corneille Nangaa’s leadership, Ceni officials inflated the cost of the electronic voting machine contract by as much as $100m (\u00a375m) for their own personal enrichment, and to fund the campaign of Mr Kabila\u2019s hand-picked candidate, Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, ahead of last year’s election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ceni’s deputy head Norbert Basengezi Katintima is accused of withdrawing $80,000 from operational funds for his personally-owned hospital, which also had the contract for medical care for all the commission’s employees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He is also accused of bribing investigators to conduct an inaccurate audit of their financial activities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His son Macellin Basengezi is accused of selling fuel for the voter registration teams which delayed the process in Kasai, an opposition stronghold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This meant many voters weren\u2019t able to take part in the elections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Felix Tshisekedi was declared the winner of the 30 December presidential election which was marred by allegations of vote rigging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The electoral commission has not responded to the BBC’s request for a comment on the allegations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The US department of treasury has issued new sanctions against three officials of the Democratic Republic of Congo electoral commission, Ceni. These sanctions relate to the two-year delay in holding general elections originally scheduled in 2016. It comes a month after a visa ban was announced against the same officials and other high-profile members of former President Joseph Kabila’s government…. Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[136],"class_list":["post-3533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article","tag-bbc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/133"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3533"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3534,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3533\/revisions\/3534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}