The Court of Appeal has granted an appeal by the Iraqi Fund for External Development that sought to quash an order of the High Court which had cancelled a payment of $8,711,096 in loans. The Iraqi Fund for External Development had filed a suit in the High Court claiming $10,964,354 from the loans it had granted the government of Uganda.
In 2002, the High Court ruled in favour of the Fund and ordered that the government pay $ 6,432,809.63 at an interest rate of 2.5% per annum from the date of judgment until payment in full. The Fund moved to recover the money and sought and obtained two certificates of order against the government. The first certificate of order was obtained in 2002, while the other was obtained in 2016. However, despite being served with these certificates, the government still refused to pay.
This forced the Fund to apply for judicial review in the High Court. However, the Presiding Judge, Lydia Mugambe, instead quashed the certificates based on a letter from the Permanent Mission of Iraq to the United Nations dated 8th June, 2017, denying that the Iraqi government had appointed any agent to recover the loan owed by the Government of Uganda to Iraq.
But in his lead judgment, Justice Fredrick Egonda-Ntende said the High Court erred in allowing extraneous matters. The Justice said once a court has had a matter, it can’t open it up again. “By the time the letter dated 8th June, 20l7 raised suspicions regarding the appellant’s capacity, the suit had already been decided, and that decision was never challenged.
The post-judgment attempt by the respondent during the execution stage to question the appellant’s capacity was an exercise in futility since the concluded case could not be reopened during a mandamus hearing…Once the trial court had issued a judgment and decree, the same court was now functus officio and could not delve into the parties’ capacity and similar issues that constitute the merits of the dispute,” the ruling reads in part.
It adds that if there was any new evidence that would have affected the case, the government had only two options: to apply for a judicial review or to apply to appeal the case out of time.
“I reject the respondent’s argument that the Court was right to intervene because it could not be seen to sanction an illegality. There is simply no illegality to speak of in this context. The letter from the Permanent Mission of Iraq to the United Nations…confirming that the Iraqi government had not appointed any agent to recover the loan owed by the Government of Uganda to Iraq, could be an allegation of an illegality, but it is not evidence of an illegality. The letter was merely a document asserting something different from that which the appellant contended in its suit, to which the respondent had agreed in part, in its response to the suit. As serious as the concerns raised in that letter may be, the letter in itself cannot be deemed as evidence of illegality to undo or discredit a decision that had already been passed by the Court in the absence of a challenge to the judgment and decree of the original suit,” the ruling reads in part.
The judge therefore issued an order to the government to pay the $8,711,096 it owes to the Iraqi Fund for External Development. The other justices on the panel were Eva Luswata and Esta Nambayo.
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