The Directorate of Intelligence and Intelligence (DIS) is facing a class action from its more than 300 officers after it defied an instruction from the Ministry of State President to settle payment arrears running into millions of Pula it owes its staff. They also show that this is despite the Ministry of Finance having included the arrears in the agency’s basic salary allocation, leaked documents show. The documents further indicate that two months after the agents notified the Attorney General of its intention to drag the spy agency before the High Court, the Ministry of State President moved swiftly to dispatch a savingram to departments which failed to pay their salary arrears to comply with a Court of Appeal order.
The savingram dated 4th May 2023 from the Acting Permanent Secretary and signed by one Jacob Momene titled “Payment of multiple grading basic salary arrears: 2023/24/recurrent budget” advised DIS and other “departments which did not manage to pay their salary arrears using savings from 2022/23 budget to urgently process them using the 2023/24 basic salary allocations in order to comply with the Court Order.” “In the same vein you are required to the identify savings which will be used to argument the basic salary account once the arrears have been processed,” said Momene. He explained that “The background to this is the Ministry of Finance has approved funds for settlement of the arrears, unfortunately the approved amount is not enough to cover all the arrears.” Momene said “out of the P87, 622,377.00 which the Ministry for State President requested, only P48, 961,090.00 was approved.” He concluded thus: “Further, kindly note that as for the Directorate on Intelligence and Security, already, the Ministry of Finance included the arrears in the Directorate’s basic salary allocation.” The Attorney General is said to have halted the class action after it shared the savingram from the Ministry of State President with the agents’ lawyers. But more than a month down the line the Directorate has not complied with the court as per the advice of the Ministry of State President. In their court papers the agents through their lawyers, Collins Chilisa Consultants seeking an order declaring that they are entitled to receive salary backpays backdated to April 2008.
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