The former Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Mohammed Adoke, yesterday for the first time explained why he withdrew court cases against some Nigerians and corporations in the last one year.
Mr Adoke, who made the explanations on Thursday during his reappointment interview at the Senate, said the government had no case against Nuhu Ribadu, the presidential candidate of the Action Congress of Nigeria who was, before Mr Adoke’s term, being prosecuted by the Code of Conduct Bureau for evading assets declaration during his tenure as chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
“There was a general perception at that time that he (Ribadu) was prosecuted because he stepped on toes as the chairman of EFCC,” he said. “There was no substantial evidence to link him to the crime he was said to have committed.”
He added that the motion to withdraw the case from court predates him, but he facilitated it because “the government ought not to be spending money on a case that will end up embarrassing the government.”
Mr Adoke said he similarly influenced the withdrawal of the case against Kenny Martins, who was at the time accused of converting police funds to personal use. He said Mr Martins was merely being prosecuted for having a difference of opinion with some government officials. He also defended his action on the controversial Vaswani brothers case.
“In the case of the Vaswani brothers, as far back as 2009, there has been a judgement of the court to the effect that the deportation of the brothers was wrongful and illegal,” Mr Adoke said.
“In fact, one of the courts even awarded damages to the tune of N10 million for malicious prosecution,” he added.
In respect of the Halliburton bribery scandal, the former minister claimed there wasn’t sufficient evidence linking any of Nigeria’s past leaders to the scam.
“In my judgement as the Attorney General, I found that it will be irresponsible to first spend money running into millions of naira to prosecute Halliburton, Julius Berger, and one other to get one million naira for the government. It is against this background that I opted to settle and we made them pay substantial amount of money to the Federal Government of Nigeria,” Mr Adoke said.
He also added that officials of the Nigeria Electricity Regulatory Commission of Nigeria, who were charged for corruption, “were wrongfully charged to court.”
Mr Adoke defended the case withdrawals, saying he made government agencies fighting corruption to obey court orders.
Merge EFCC and ICPC
Mr Adoke, who will probably retain his position as Attorney General, berated the anti-corruption agencies, especially the EFCC, for lacking focus and human capacity to deal with corruption in Nigeria, and advised that it should be merged with the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC).
“First and foremost, the act establishing the ICPC is to fight official corruption while, by the act setting up the EFCC, they are supposed to fight economic crime and money laundering,” he said.
“But regrettably, the operators of the two agencies have not properly understood the extent of their powers or their statutory mandate and so it’s been overlapping, and when we at the ministry of justice try to guide them, they see it as interference. It will be appropriate to merge these two agencies together for purposes of effective fight in the war against corruption,” he said.
He added that Nigeria does not need a special court to try corruption cases, but that the anti-corruption agencies should invest more on human capacity building.
He said the EFCC lacks the professionalism to investigate and collate substantial evidence that can sustain most of their charges and end up blaming judges for delays in their cases or the justice ministry for “interference.”
Seven more minsters cleared
The Senate also cleared seven more ministerial nominees after a stretched ceremonial screening. The cleared ministers included Muhammed Adoke (Kogi), Shamsudeen Usman (Kano), Mohammed Musa Sada (Katsina), Labaran Maku (Nasarawa), Yusuf Suleiman (Sokoto), Zainab Maina (Adamawa), and Stellah Oduah-Ogiemwonyi (Anambra).
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