MPs and their senate counterparts had completed repayment of Ksh 460 million by end of the 2021/22 fiscal year, according to Michael Sialai, Clerk of the National Assembly who confirmed that.
The MPs and Senators were irregularly paid the money in allowances between October 2018 and December 2020.
According to Sialai, each lawmaker was asked to refund about Ksh 1 million which meant they had to be deducted between Ksh 169,000 and Ksh 172,000 from their monthly salary.
” We have now fully complied with the court order; the end of
June was the last deduction. It was a painful decision but we had to do it in compliance with the court order.For some, the option to pay out what they owed in cash worked, while we had to do the monthly deductions for others so that no member finishes his or her term with that public debt,” Sialai said.
This came after the Court of Appeal upheld the decision by the High Court asking them to refund allowances of Ksh250,000 in-house and accommodation, as having been irregularly approved by the Parliamentary Service Commission (PSC).
According to the High Court in a petition filed by the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC), declaring the move by the parliament
employers to award allowances unconstitutional.
Citing that the parliament employer lacked both the constitutional and statutory mandates of setting salaries for MPs and the parliamentary staff.
Justices Pauline Nyamweya, Weldon Korir, and John Mativo of
the High Court agreed with the petition filed by SRC challenging the
awarded allowances to the members of parliament and staff.
