EFCC probes NASS allocations from 2014

There are indications that Federal Government may have started a probe of the N300bn allocated to the National Assembly in the 2014 and 2015 budgets.

According to reports, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, has already asked the Clerk of the National Assembly, Sani Omolori to furnished it with the details of the budgets and details of the contracts warded by federal legislature.

Some principal officers of the seventh and the current Assembly, including former Senate President, David Mark, his deputy, Ike Ekweremadu, Speaker Yakubu Dogara and his deputy, Lasun Yusuf are billed to be interrogated over the budgetary allocations.

It would be recalled that a former Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations, Abdumumin Jibrin, had petitioned the EFCC over alleged budget padding by the Speaker, Dogara and three other principal officers of the House.

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However, the anti-graft agencies is said to have decided to extend its probe to the 2014 and 2015 fiscal years.

According to an EFCC source, though Jibrin’s petition has to do with the 2016 budget, the agency is extending it’s probe to 2014 and 2015 since funds had not been released for the projects that said to have been inserted in the current budget.

The source said: “You know the National Assembly has never made its budget public. Besides Jibrin’s petitions, there are others that will make investigations into the 2014 and 2015 budgets inevitable.

“For example, a group, the Anti-Corruption Unit of the National Youth Council of Nigeria, in a petition to the EFCC, alleged that N418m contracts were awarded in 2014 to firms linked to Jibrin.

“The contracts included the supply of beans and millets to Kano State awarded to Eleku Construction Limited.”

The EFCC spokesman, Wilson Uwajuren, confirmed the move, saying the agency has requested for the details of the 2014 and 2015 budgetary allocations to the National Assembly.

By Timothy Enietan-Matthews

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