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Stop taking loans, recover $200bn loot, Falana warns FG
Instead of plunging the nation into more indebtedness, the federal government has been advised to muster the political will required to recover loot standing at $200 billion stolen from the government or not remitted into the federation account.
Rights lawyer Femi Falana (SAN) stated this in an April 8 letter he sent to Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun, advising her to shelve the $2 billion President Muhammadu Buhari is soliciting from China.
The letter is was entitled: Request for the collection of outstanding $200 billion withheld from the Federation Account or stole by looters.
“However, if you refuse to accede to our request we shall have no alternative than to initiate legal proceedings at the Federal High Court with a view to restraining the federal government from further plunging the nation into external indebtedness,” Falana stated in the letter.
The Lagos lawyer has been following the APC government moves to snatch a couple of loans from the World Bank and the African Development Bank.
In February, he wrote the minister, asking her to drop the plan for a $2.5 billion loan from the Bretton Woods institution and a N1 billion from the AfDB. He said the government can loot intp alternative sources of revenue to finance 2016 budget instead of getting deeper in the hole.
According to him, Nigeria’s external debt now stands at $64 billion.
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Adeosun assured him then that his concerns were being looked into.
In the new letter, Falana was a little more specific. “We requested the federal government to embark on the recovery of the revenue of $42 billion withheld from the federation account from 1999 to 2012 by some transnational oil companies, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, and other agencies of the federal government,” he wrote.
Referring to the minister’s assurances after the first correspondence, the senior lawyer said he was surprised to learn that the administration is already far gone in a fresh loan deal with Beijing.
“We are compelled to advise the federal government to intensify efforts to recover the nation’s wealth which has been criminally diverted by a handful of local and foreign looters,” he added.
Falana, whom many believed was a big fan of the APC government, has been the loudest critic of the administration since November when Buhari’s cabinet was put in place.
The lawyer has hammered the government over extra-judicial punishments it inflicts on prime suspect like ex-NSA Dasuki Sambo, separatist IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu, and others.