The Financial Action Task Force(FATF) defines a Politically Exposed Person (PEP) as an individual who is or has been entrusted with a prominent function. It goes ahead to mention that many PEPs hold positions that can be abused for the laundering of illicit funds or other predicate offences such as corruption and bribery. Well, a number of African countries especially in the Sahel, Eastern and Southern Africa regions are grappling with cases of PEPs being at the centre of financial and money related crimes. 

Since October 2023, the International Money Crime News Agency has been coordinating an investigative effort that has focused on PEPs especially Diplomats and Cabinet Ministers. In the first part of this series, we bring you the story of Betty Oyella Bigombe.

We have pinned the current Ugandan Diplomat and former Minister Betty Oyella Bigombe, who also happens to be an Ex-World Bank official. Betty Bigombe is Uganda’s High Commissioner to Malaysia She has been placed at the helm of a sophisticated cyber and financial crime network that has mainly targeted the middle-aged and elderly Ugandan diaspora who recognise Betty Bigombe as an eminent person. 

We have discovered that she is well connected to and (in private invokes the name of) the veteran Ugandan President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, who has been in power since 1986. While, we did not find any proof of Museveni sanctioning or even condoning the actions of Betty Bigombe, we found irrefutable evidence that proved that she was the architect and ultimate beneficiary of the actions of this criminal syndicate. 

In what appears to be a blatant abuse of the shortcomings in Uganda’s criminal justice system, Betty Bigombe is able to exploit tech savvy young boys who receive the funds on her behalf and are ready to be ‘convicted’ and ‘sentenced’ to prison, but mysteriously come out of jail by her own admission. 
When one of the victims named Joyce intensified efforts to recover her money, Betty Bigombe initiated sham criminal proceedings with the Uganda Police’s Criminal Investigation Directorate, which forwarded the matter to a magistrates court in Kampala citing impersonation by Carlos Odoki. When this was happening, our team of cybersecurity professionals unearthed a call data record link analysis showing that all this while, Betty Bigombe, through her MTN Uganda registered Telephone number +256 782547431 was in constant communication with the so called impersonator Carlos Odoki. 

We were able to put together the script of the entire criminal operation executed by the elderly Betty Bigombe and her team and in summary, it goes as follows;

  1. Betty Bigombe identifies her target from amongst family, friends or acquaintances and reaches out to them via WhatsApp using her American or Ugandan number.
  2. She makes calls and exchanges messages with them over a period of 1-2 weeks. By this time, the victim who actually knows her, is very sure that they are talking to Betty Bigombe.
  3. She then creates a sickness and continually updates her target that her health is failing her and she can no longer talk on phone – restricting the interactions to only text messages
  4. With the voice calls out of the picture, she then asks for financial assistance to her workers back home in Uganda who have to run errands for her in a deal to take some merchandise to South Sudan. She promises to pay back all the monies sent to her workers – key among them is her accomplice named Carlos.
  5. After extracting a substantial amount (between USD 15,000 and USD 30,000), she then promises to pay the victim once she returns to Kampala for a physical meeting.
  6. As the victim follows up on her, she turns around and claims that Carlos was impersonating her and she has never asked for money from the victim. At this point Betty Bigombe conveniently throws around her weight as an Ex-World Bank, Cabinet Minister and Diplomat who could not have stooped so low to borrow money. 
  7. She then volunteers to help the victim get justice by opening up a case against Carlos. She offers to coordinate the whole legal process starting with the filing of complaints at the Police’s Directorate of Criminal Investigations. 
  8. With the case now opened in the courts, she has successfully and mischievously run away from her obligations to pay. She then starts skipping court sessions to drag on the matter such that the victims can give up. 

In November/December 2023, our team in Kampala enlisted the services of a top Ugandan investigator, cybersecurity guru and software engineer named Ronald Egesa (also famed for having rolled out the country’s first mobile money platform in 2008, before the launch of Mobile Money services by the telecoms). 

Egesa reached out to Betty Bigombe and even arranged a conference call with two of her victims including a close maternal relative based in Scandinavia. The clips can be found at;

  1. https://soundcloud.com/egesa-ronald-leonard/bigombe-against-common-sense
  2. https://soundcloud.com/egesa-ronald-leonard/bigombe-bribe
  3. https://soundcloud.com/egesa-ronald-leonard/bigombe-longer-version 

Following this interrogation, Egesa’s take was as follows;

  1. Betty Oyella Bigombe needs to undergo a psychiatric examination because she exhibited delusional tendencies and incoherence of speech.
  2. She has mastered the art of manipulating the system and abusing the criminal justice system and in the process inflicted a lot of damage and caused financial loss to many families. 
  3. There could be criminal or highly incompetent elements within the Police Force of Uganda that are either knowingly or unknowingly part of her syndicate. The leadership of the Uganda Police needs to act swiftly and investigate these fellows because there is no way you can admit claims of impersonation and go ahead to forward the matter to the prosecutors and courts without proof of compromise of her devices, social media accounts or email addresses. Impersonation on WhatsApp or even social media networks cannot be proved by only word of mouth without backing of a proper cyber forensic examination. 

Along the way, Betty Bigombe learnt that Egesa was pursuing the matter without ceasing, she sent a message to her accomplices within the security services instructing them to move very fast on Egesa and Joyce (one of her victims). Indeed, that very night and the following days, there were five cases of break-ins at two of Egesa’s properties in the Ugandan capital Kampala and neighbouring town of Entebbe. This only showed us the level of impunity with which this racket operates. 

When we interviewed one of the victims named Joyce, she intimated to us that she had tried to seek the assistance of prominent Acholi (Ugandan Luo Tribe) within the country’s politics and judiciary, but they all feared to cross the path of Betty Bigombe because of her ‘special’ connection to the first family.

We could not fully establish what this ‘special’ connection is in form and structure, but there is no doubt that it has served Betty’s criminal actions well. 

In what appeared to be a clear case of reputation laundering, Betty Bigombe had an honorary Doctorate Degree conferred on her by the country’s premier University – Makerere University Kampala (formerly, a constituent college of the University of London and the University of East Africa). In the days leading to this bizarre conferment, we sent an email to the University’s Vice Chancellor, Prof. Barnabas Nawangwe (who presided over the exercise) and notified him of our preliminary findings in the investigation and he was childishly dismissive. He did not make any effort to investigate the veracity of our claims. 

We have also advised some of the victims, especially those with dual nationality, to involve the embassies of their European countries to engage with the office of the president in Uganda so that they can be helped to get justice and have their monies paid back. We were yet to receive updates on this by the time of this publication. 

While the victims continue to suffer, it is looking increasingly unlikely for Betty Bigombe to be brought to book except through the express intervention of Uganda’s Head of State. This is just one of the many cases of politically exposed persons taking advantage of the unsuspecting citizens to fleece them off.