Nairobi — The Government has for the past three years been holding a report on investigations to trace and recover proceeds of corruption siphoned out of this country during the Moi regime.

The last instalment of the report by Kroll Associates, one of the leading forensic investigations firms in the world, was delivered to the Government in April 2004, about a year after the investigation was commissioned.

It contained a wealth of information about the extent of looting from the public coffers in the previous government.

The investigators had also uncovered a lot of fresh information about wealth hidden in bank accounts, company shares and real estate in the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia and tax havens in Europe and offshore havens.

The report also recommended areas of further investigation and methods that could be used to recover the wealth identified.

One would have expected that the Kenya Government would have moved with alacrity to try and recover funds that, according to the report, placed Kenya in the league of Mobutu's Zaire and Abacha's Nigeria in official looting and associated money laundering.

The report provides a classic example of how a state can become a criminal enterprise. It was commissioned specifically so that the stolen funds can be traced and restored to the people of Kenya. It was also to identify the perpetrators for punishment.

For some reason, the Government elected not to act on the report. But the report is now in the public domain. The big question is why the Government chose not to act. Knee-jerk reactions about leakage of the report being part of a scheme to hurt the government politically do not hold water.

It is the Government that hurts itself by refusing so patently to act on high-level graft.

Perhaps that might be explained by the curious way in which figures who engineered looting and money laundering in the Moi State House were accommodated in the Kibaki State House; and how looting and plunder that was started in the past regime was inherited so happily by the current regime.