THE Icelandic whistleblower who played a key role in revealing the Fishrot fishing quotas corruption and fraud scandal is a “self-confessed criminal” with a drug-abuse problem, a senior lawyer claimed in the Windhoek High Court yesterday.
Continuing with his cross-examination of Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) investigator Andreas Kanyangela after a two-week break in the bail hearing of six of the accused in the Fishrot case, senior counsel Vas Soni latched onto an affidavit filed at the High Court in a separate case to repeat that the whistleblower Jóhannes Stefánsson has been accused of being a criminal who has had problems with his mental health and drug abuse.
Soni made those claims based on a sworn statement which an executive of the Icelandic fishing company group Samherji, Ingvar Júlíusson, made in a Prevention of Organised Crime Act case in which the prosecutor general has had the assets of accused persons and corporate entities connected to the Fishrot case placed under a provisional restraint order.
In the statement, Júlíusson referred to Stefánsson as the “star witness” of the prosecutor general, and claimed that he is “a self-confessed criminal” and that without his evidence there would be no case against Icelandic-owned companies accused of having been involved in multimillion-dollar corruption and fraud in Namibia's fishing industry.
Júlíusson also claimed that Stefánsson, who managed Samherji's Namibian operations from 2011 to 2016, “abruptly left the...
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