Magistrate: Keep politics out of court

SENIOR magistrate Sinclair Gora made it very clear on Monday that he was not interested in politics.
“Politics is not my business,” he said, adding that his job was to hear court cases, not settle political disputes.
Gora said this at the Waigani Committal Court when hearing a K4 million misappropriation case against contractor John Mauwe who had appeared on a K5,000 police bail with his lawyer John Napu.
He told Napu that the political motives behind why his client had been charged was not his business.
“This court will deal with what is before it and they are that Mauwe is charged with 19 counts totalling K4 million – that is what is before me.”
Napu had argued that the amounts his client was charged with were defective and got the court to adjourn until Nov 29 to provide correct figures.
Earlier, he told the court that Mauwe was in court because of a political vendetta against him by a political rival which he named.
Mauwe’s court charge read that he “did directly in a transaction that involved money in the sum of K4 million that he knew to be the proceeds of crime”.
He is charged with 19 counts of receiving and spending monies that he was alleged to have misappropriated – money for the renovation and rehabilitation work on Aiyura National High School located in Eastern Highlands’ Kainantu district. 
Police said that Mauwe, 42, of Basi village, Kainantu, had, through his construction company Mauwe Construction Ltd, won a K4 million contract to rehabilitate the school facilities but had allegedly expended the monies for other purposes.