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Reps probe $17m payment to Malami lawyers from Abacha’s loot

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Reps probe $17m payment to Malami lawyers from Abacha’s loot

The House of the Representatives on Thursday waged into the saga surrounding the proposed payment of $16.9 million (N6 billion) to lawyers contracted by the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF), Abubakar Malami, for the recovery of loot by the former military Head of State, General Sani Abacha.

The lawmakers concluded that the House was going to set up an ad-hoc committee to investigate the matter as well as to probe why some Nigeria lawyers would again be contracted for a fee of $16.9 million after the major work to the recovery of the loot had been concluded by other lawyers.

In a motion moved by Mark Gbilah (Benue-APC), and unanimously adopted by the House, the lawmakers urged President Muhammadu Buhari to suspend the payment of the said fee of $16.9 million or any part thereof pending investigation on the matter.

The committee is supposed to conclude probe into the matter within six weeks and report its findings to the House.

This came just as the Finance Minister, Kemi Adeosun, had refuted media report that she blocked payment of the $16.9 million to Malami’s lawyers for the recovery of the loot said to be worth $321 million.

The minister had also debunked the story that there were controversies surrounding the recovery of the loot and that she never wrote any letter to President Muhammadu Buhari to object to payment of any amount of money to some lawyers.

It was learnt that a Swiss lawyer, Enrico Monfrini, who was contracted by the Nigerian Government since 1999 to work on recovering the Abacha loot, had finished the Luxembourg leg of the job since 2014 while Mohammed Bello Adoke was still the Attorney-General of the Federation.

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Monfrini was said to have already been paid for his services by the Federal Government, after the recovered money was domiciled with the Attorney-General of Switzerland, and waiting for the signing of an MoU with Nigeria to avoid the issues of accountability around previous recoveries.

However, after Federal Government and Swiss Government signed the MoU waiting for the money to be repatriated to Nigeria, Malami was said to have again engaged the services of another set of lawyers in 2016 for a fee of about $16.9 million.

The new lawyers said to have been contracted by Malami are Oladipo Okpeseyi and Temitope Adebayo. The two of them were said to have worked for President Buhari’s Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), which later merged with other parties to become the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC).

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