President Lazarus Chakwera on Wednesday told Parliament that the department of immigration system for passport printing has been hacked, and the digital mercenaries are demanding huge unspecified payment.
However, Chakwera assured the parliamentarians that government will not bow down to their demands.
“I am duty bound to inform Malawians that printing of passports has been suspended because the system at immigration was hacked by digital mercenaries who infiltrated it. Government is taking decisive steps to regain control of the situation.
“As long as I am President, the government will never pay a ransom money you have demanded after hacking the system because we are not in the business of appeasing criminals with public money. Nor are we negotiating with those who attack our country.
“Secondly, we have opened an investigation to trace and track this hack to its source, and when we find you, you will be brought to justice and there will be no clemency or mercy,” he said without specifying how much it is being demanded.
The AG said at the time that the contract was cancelled because it was not supposed to be signed as it was fraught with irregularities.
The AG told journalists that apart from retaining proceeds from the production of passports, Techno Brain had been asking for payment from Account Number One.
The contract signed in March 2019 by the then ruling Democratic Progressive Party government was for Techno Brain Global FZE of United Arab Emirates (UAE) to upgrade the country’s passport issuance system.
The deal also involved the introduction of an electronic passport under the build, operate and transfer (BoT) model by providing 800 000 electronic passports.
Documentation which this paper saw at the time showed that the supplier of passport sources the booklets from Vienna, Austria where the average unit cost of each booklet is $9.13 (K7 221.83) and from Singapore where the cost was around $1.73 (K1 368.43).
The supplier was then selling the booklet to the government at $76 (K60 166), including supply of 1 600 units of ink ribbons and 1 600 crystagrams—a series of holographic images—required for the printing of e-passport booklets.
Rough calculations showed that Techno Brain was making a profit of between $66.87 (K52 894.17) and $74.27 (K58 708.02) per booklet supplied to the Malawi Government.
