RwandAir, the national carrier, has suffered loss of funds at the hands of its former employees who formed an insider racket and defrauded the airline.
Private and public institutions are increasingly losing huge sums of money through theft initiated by their own staff.
RwandAir is the latest to fall victim to these organised rackets after a number of staff are alleged to have connived to swindle Rwf21 million.
The theft is said to have gone on for a long time without being detected.
Although RwandAir said that it lost Rwf21 Million, some unconfirmed reports revealed it could be as much as Rwf600 million.
The national carrier last week arrested two staff members while another was still on the run by press time in connection with the theft.
The illegal transactions carried out by the suspects that caused financial losses to RwandAir included diverting funds from tickets sales.
Suspects working in the finance and operations departments were said to be in a better position to swindle the funds with less suspicion.
John Mirenge, chief executive officer of RwandAir, said in a statement that the airline is working with police to investigate the matter.
“Our stakeholders should rest assured that the airline follows strict vetting procedures as part of the recruitment process and strict business operations procedures, which will even be more tightened to avoid such occurrences in future,” said Mr Mirenge.
Established legal measures
“Upon successful closure of the investigations, established legal measures will be followed to handle this case in the most transparent manner,” added Mr Mirenge.
Other companies which were defrauded last year alone included Tigo and some commercial banks like I&M.
In November last year, police arrested two people who were suspected of participating in a cyber-crime ring that defrauded Tigo of funds close to Rwf495 million. The two suspects were agents for the Tigo cash product platform who colluded with a Tigo employee in charge of electronic money transfer to commit the crime.
The Tigo case is still in court and the suspects are still in remand while the main suspects are still at large.
Five more Tigo staff have since been suspended because they did not take due diligence while carrying out their work.
“We have since worked upon upgrading our Tigo cash platform to improve the security of our system and we confident our clients are protected,” said Pierre Kayitana, communications manager of Tigo.
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