The pan-African monthly counts the former Minister of Finance and Agriculture among the African personalities in disgrace with the justice of their country, and who have more or less been condemned and do not dare to return to the territory where they were tried.
In its September 2021 edition, the magazine Jeune Afrique drew up a table of the twenty Africans most wanted by justice for various reasons, either for their refusal to be accountable for their management of public management, or because they fear for their lives. The newspaper ranks former Cameroonian minister Lazare Essimi Menye among the continent’s most sought-after personalities.
Indeed, the former Minister of Finance and Agriculture, residing in the state of Virginia in the United States where he has been in exile since December 2015, no longer dares to return to his country, for fear of being embellished and thrown in jail. He was indeed sentenced in absentia in March 2020 by the Special Criminal Court (TCS), “for having paid 2.5 billion FCFA (3.8 million euros) to a chartered accountant in order to hide a scandal of 46 billion FCFA observed during the audit of the activities of the general surveillance society (SGC), ”said Jeune Afrique.
It should be noted that he managed to leave the country by medical evacuation after suffering a heart attack, according to official sources. And since December 2015, when he left, he no longer dares to return to the country, surely for fear of being put in jail and thrown in prison.
It is important to specify that among these 20 personalities inventoried by the pan-African magazine, we also find the former Central African President François Bozizé, or the former Ivorian Prime Minister Guillaume Soro.