Arthur Mutambara Accused Of Defrauding Global Fund By Using Plagiarized Consultancy Report

Former Deputy Prime Minister Professor Arthur Mutambara has been alleged to have defrauded Switzerland based non-profit-organisation Global Fund. Mutambara is accused of submitting plagiarised reports after he was awarded two consultancy contracts through the Mutambara Foundation in 2014. The foundation was paid $$115 000 in consultancy fees for four written documents. The foundation also received US$40 000 for travel expenses.

The Office of the Inspector-General’s (OIG) ran the reports through plagiarism detection software and said,

The software showed that 56% of the text in the interim report and 43% of the text in the final report had been plagiarised from sources publically available on the internet. In addition, the OIG checked both the interim report and the final report against sources publically available on the internet and the information that was provided by the sourcing department to the Director of the Mutambara Foundation as background for this project.

This additional manual check confirmed the findings of the plagiarism software. The same finding also applied to the Participant Slides and the Deployment Algorithm. The text, charts and images in 46 of the 80 substantive slides in the participant slides and 22 of the 75 slides in the Deployment Algorithm were copied directly from other sources without credit . . . The vast majority of the plagiarised material was taken wholesale from a 2013 copyright-protected book that covers issues related to the global problem of substandard and falsified medicines.

However, Mutambara denied the reports saying the issue was resolved internally and that his political opponents were trying to tarnish his image,

This is a three-year-old false and malicious report which was internally resolved with the Global Fund CEO Mark Dybul. I was not even involved in the performance of the work. The report is being brought up and circulated three years later by political opponents to tarnish my image, in this election year.

More: The Zimbabwe Independent