AG Frank Mbeta has history of bribing, judge shopping

By Jerome Chisikwa

No country on earth can develop with Frank Mbeta as its Attorney General, and no serious country can have Frank Mbeta as Attorney General.

Mbeta’s alleged long history of corruption and judicial fraud is as long as his career at the bar.

In 2015, then in private practice, the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) accused him of offering MK2 million to a Malawi Revenue Authority ICT manager to delete computer files belonging to a client under investigation for tax evasion.

The ACB sought his arrest, the Director of Public Prosecutions granted consent, and yet Mbeta obtained an injunction, and over a decade later no trial has taken place.

In 2016, investigative reports accused him of taking high-value debt cases to the same judge, Justice Kenyatta Nyirenda, and securing execution orders with unusual speed.

For example the AHL Commodities Exchange case, where sheriffs shut down company offices over a MK2 billion claim days after damages were assessed, and where he allegedly demanded up to 30 percent of the judgment proceeds.

A MK785 million case involving Maranatha Ministries followed the same pattern of same judge, same courthouse, same rapid execution, prompting an ACB affidavit and public suspicion that he had perfected a system of “judge shopping.”

In November 2017, High Court Judge John Katsala recorded in an official ruling that the current Minister of Foreign Affairs, George Chaponda had said he could only use Mbeta as counsel because Mbeta “knows how to bribe judges to win cases.”

Judge Katsala went further, describing Mbeta as an “expert in judge shopping.”

In the 2019–2020 presidential election petition bribery saga, Constitutional Court Judge Mike Tembo testified that he had been told money was being sent to judges hearing the election case and explicitly named Mbeta as the alleged conduit, with sums exceeding MK100 million allegedly sourced from businessman Thomson Mpinganjira.

Fast forward to 2026, Frank Mbeta is sits at the top of Malawi’s bar as Attorney General, and he has not stopped his alleged questionable activities.

This year, he approved a MK51 million severance package for Bob Chimkango, a former DPP campaign monitor fired at the Malawi Housing Corporation (MHC) over allegations of financial misconduct, including cash and a Toyota Fortuner, even as an ACB investigation into Chimkango’s misuse of allowances was still underway. The pattern is not a series of unlucky coincidences. It is a career.

A lawyer accused of bribery in 2015, named in judicial records as a manipulator of courts in 2017, linked to alleged election bribery in 2020, and now signing off multimillion-kwacha settlements in 2026 sits at the top of Malawi’s justice system.

The very office responsible for safeguarding public interest and supervising state litigation.

No court has convicted him, no tribunal has removed him, but no institution has cleared him either, and that unresolved shadow is now inseparable from the credibility of the state’s own anti-corruption agenda.

How can a system promise accountability when its gatekeeper of justice carries a decade-long record of allegations, judicial criticism, and politically sensitive interventions?

Mbeta insists on due process and dismisses the allegations as politically motivated, and legally he remains innocent but innocence is not the same as fitness for the highest legal office in the land.

A man who has been described on the record by a sitting judge as an “expert in judge shopping” has no business supervising the courts he is accused of manipulating.

In a functional country, Mbeta would have been disbarred long ago.