Top government officials under investigation for fraud

Three Permanent Secretaries are said to be under investigation over alleged abuse of office and corruption running into billions of Naira.

Chairman of the Special Presidential Investigative Panel for the Recovery of Public Property (SPIPR), Okoi Obono-Obla disclosed this on Wednesday at a news conference in Abuja.

Although, Obono-Obla declined to name the permanent secretaries, he said one of the Permanent Secretaries bought a house in Asokoro in the name of her eight-year old son for over N500 million.

He also said that the female top government functionary had a registered company through which she had been conducting businesses. “We got a petition from a whistle-blower about the property. So we have commenced investigation.

“Our investigation is yet to be concluded because when we are investigating a public officer we also investigate the siblings, relations and fronts so you won’t be able to link-up their names with such persons.

“The other one was alleged to have included projects in budget of 2017 and 2018 that were fake and also was allegedly collecting money to pay for goods and services that are no more in existence.

“The other permanent secretary, we also got information from a whistle-blower that he has a lot of landed property, including a hotel, in Abuja.

“From our investigation, he did not declare his assets.

“He was inaugurated as permanent secretary in October, 2017, and in accordance with Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) procedure, assets declaration form was given to him to declare his assets.

“We started investigating him since last year and we discovered that he was given the form and he did not return the form to the CCB,” Obono-Obla said.

The chairman further said that the panel had been making a lot of recoveries for the Federal Government, from banks.

“We have continued to recover huge sums of monies from commercial banks being excessive charges that banks had applied on accounts of Federal Government agencies that were domiciled with them before the introduction of TSA.”

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He said that the most recent of the recoveries was over N216 million from a commercial bank.

“We want to protect the identity of that bank because disclosing it will affect the economy,” he said.