The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission has questioned the Director
General and 24 other officials of a Federal Government parastatal under
the Foreign Affairs Ministry over the questionable withdrawal of the
sum of $219,000.00 (about N66 million) from the account of the Nigerian
Technical Cooperation Fund, NTCF.
The money, which was meant to
provide some development projects for some African countries in the 2013
fiscal year, is jointly managed by the African Development Bank and the
NTCF and domiciled in the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN.
Vanguard
learnt that the head of the parastatal, who is from Borno State,
connived with 24 other Nigerian officials in the parastatal and
illegally siphoned the amount for personal use, thereby triggering
petitions to the EFCC from aggrieved insider staff of the agency.
Based
on the series of petitions fired by insiders, the EFCC immediately
dispatched operatives, who posed as auditors and spend days to
scrutinise the accounts of the agency.
“It was clear to use that
the money in question had been withdrawn by the officials but what we
want to know is on what the money was used for,” one of the sources
close to the investigation, told our correspondent in Abuja.
“Having
established a prima facie case of illegal withdrawal, we invited the DG
and the 24 staff and they were interrogated between Tuesday and
Thursday and all of them made useful statements to the commission.
“They
were all admitted to administrative bail having accepted to refund the
money to the last kobo and we have asked them to report back on
Thursday,” an EFCC source confirmed llast night.
It was however
gathered that some influential politicians from Borno State, where the
DG hails from, have attempted to prevail on the EFCC to tamper justice
with mercy and grant the man what they term “soft landing
No comments:
Post a Comment