.MUTETEKA

By PERPETUAL SICHIKWENKWE –

CONVICTED Chisambia Member of Parliament (MP) Moses Muteteka has appealed to the Supreme Court against the High Court’s decision to dismiss his appeal and uphold his five-year jail sentence for stealing a motor vehicle belonging to his constituency
Muteteka, the former Local Government deputy minister has said in his submissions to the Supreme Court that he must be acquitted of the charge because it was not true that he stole the vehicle.
The Lusaka High Court last week upheld Muteteka’s five years imprisonment slapped on him by the Magistrate court for stealing a motor vehicle belonging to the Chisamba constituency.
But Muteteka argued that the High Court has made the same mistake that was made by the magistrate court of failing to evaluate the evidence on record effectively.
Muteteka who has filed four grounds in his appeal said the High Court erred in law and in fact when it upheld the judgment of the subordinate court that there was theft of motor vehicle registration number ABX 3529 just because the vehicle was registered in his name without taking into account the evidence on record that Chisamba
constituency was not permanently deprived of the vehicle.
The court also erred in law and fact when it came to a wrong finding of that the vehicle was a property of the Government when the same was registered in the name of Chisamba constituency at the time he was arrested.
Mr Muteteka appealed to the Supreme Court to also consider the fact that there was no complainant in the matter for him to have been arrested for theft.
He said that the court further erred in law and fact when it came to a wrong finding of the fact that there was no swapping of vehicles registration number ABX 3529 and ABV 1000 thereby coming to a further finding that he did register the vehicle ABX 3529 in his name and that there was no minutes of the constituency development fund meeting that decided to swap the vehicles.