The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission has
discovered a fresh N14bn fraud in the pensions office of the Nigeria
Police Force on Saturday evening.
This comes less than two weeks after the Chairman of
the Pension Reform Task Force, Abdulrasheed Maina, publicly said corrupt
pension officials in the pensions department within the Office of the
Head of Service were embezzling over N3.3bn monthly.
Maina particularly said a N28bn police pension fund was found dormant in one account at the police pension office.
Our correspondent gathered from a highly-placed
source within the EFCC that this latest fraud was perpetrated by senior
officials of the office.
Investigations showed that between January 5, 2009
and May 6, 2011, the officials used the name of the Director of Pensions
to draw a total of 13, 874 cheques.
“Hundreds of such cheques are raised daily and
endorsed by the cashier of one of the old generation banks for over the
counter withdrawal.
“The withdrawals were in flagrant violation of the
Federal Government e-payment circular which came into effect on January
1, 2009.
“The monies, once drawn, are shared among the officials,” the source said.
Already, seven of the officials have been arrested by the EFCC for the fraud out of which five of them were signatories to the account.
Even though the source refused to give our
correspondent the name of the suspects, she however said there were
three directors and a serving permanent secretary in one of the federal
ministries among them.
“Others are top officials of the accounts department
of the office. They were picked up in different locations but have been
admitted to administrative bail. The commission is however still on the
trail of others fingered in the fraud.”
When contacted on Saturday evening to confirm the
report, the spokesman of the EFCC, Wilson Uwujaren, said, “Yes, we have
made some arrests and the money involved is N14bn. We are charging them
to court soon and more details will be made known to the public.”
While reporting the task force’s findings to the
Acting Chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices and other Related
Offences Commission, Ekpo Nta, Maina had said monies were being
embezzled monthly via a system of over 100,000 ghost pensioners
programmed into a central database, which was discovered when the task
force used proprietary software.
“A figure of 258,000 pensioners was submitted to the
Budget Office by the ‘cartel’ in the pension office for which N5bn was
usually released monthly.
“But out of the N5bn, the task force discovered that
the government only needed N1.7bn out of N5bn to pay the 70,657 genuine
pensioners.
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This is wickedness, while old people die on the queue because of the money they worked for which was denied them, these people in charge of the pension keep on embezzling money that is not theirs. Even if no one discovers God will definitely punish all of them because they have done grievous act against old people in our nation and have killed several of them.
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