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N90bn saga: Osinbajo fights back, waives immunity
Following series of bad media against the office of Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, the embattled number two citizen is fighting back to salvage his damaged reputation.
The Vice President in a tweet on Wednesday declared his readiness to waive his constitutional immunity to “enable the most robust adjudication” of several baseless allegations, insinuation and falsehoods against his person and office.
Recall that Osinbajo, through his lawyer, Femi Falana (SAN) had written Vangaurd Newspapers accusing it of publishing a libelous story entitled “N90 bn FIRS election fund, Osinbanjo’s problem, not 2023 politics-Frank”
In the story, Osinbajo was alleged to have mismanaged N90 Billion Naira released by the Federal Inland Revenue Inland Service (FIRS) to prosecute the last general elections in favour of the APC”.
Osinbajob described the report as wicked and reckless, and therefore demanded for a retraction of the story coupled with an apology prominently published in the newspaper or face legal action.
Reacting to the fraud allegation, Osinbajo in a tweet on Wednesday said in the past few days, a spate of reckless and malicious falsehoods have been peddled in the media against his person by a group of malicious individuals.
“The defamatory and misleading assertions invented by this clique had mostly been making the social media rounds anonymously.
“I have today instructed the commencement of legal action against two individuals, one Timi Frank and another Katch Ononuju, who have put their names to these odious falsehoods.
“I will waive my constitutional immunity to enable the most robust adjudication of these claims of libel and malicious falsehood.”
Meanwhile, the National Social Investment Office (NSIO) on Wednesday cleared Yemi Osinbajo from financial scandal relating to disbursement of funds for the National Social Investment Programmes (N-SIPs)
A statement by the organisation’s Communications Manager, Justice Bibiye, stated that the Ministry of Budget and National Planning was in charge of all assignment relating to financing, budgeting, procurement and disbursement of funds allocated and released for the N-SIPs.
The statement explained that N-SIPs, which involves four broad programmes (N-Power, Conditional Cash Transfers, National Home-Grown School Feeding and Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programmes), planned towards different subgroups of Nigerians for empowerment.
“All payments on the programmes are transferred directly to beneficiaries from the Federal Government coffers. The only exception is in relation to the cash transfer programme, basically because the beneficiaries reside in areas where there is a dearth of banking infrastructure. Being much too poor to travel long distances to receive the monthly N5, 000 disbursements, the decision was taken to ensure the funds are conveyed to them at their places of residence.