According to SaharaReporters, former Commonwealth Secretary, Chief Emeka Anyaoku was mandated by ex President Jonathan to appeal to President Muhammadu Buhari to halt the launch of an official probe of his administration. It should be recalled that the President has made it his major priority to curb the menace of corruption in the country as well as the recovery of sums of money looted from the country's treasury by corrupt politicians.
The news was revealed to the online platform by close aides of Buhari who claimed Jonathan is currently in fear concerning the missing $20 billion dollars from the Excess Crude Account which is highly debated. According to the source, this is not the first time Jonathan will be making an attempt to plead with Buhari to help cover his financial misdeeds. He reportedly sent former military Head of State, Gen.Abdulsalami Abubakar to help pacify the president against going after him.
SaharaReporters sources disclosed that Mr. Anyaoku spent a little more than two hours in a close-door meeting yesterday where he sought to prevail on President Buhari to halt the ongoing probe of what happened to billions of public funds during the last few months of the Jonathan government.
One of the committees has already discovered that Mr. Jonathan and some members of his cabinet apparently colluded in the dying days of the previous government to loot billions of dollars. The funds were looted via the Central Bank of Nigeria, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), the Ministry of Finance, the Nigerian Maritime Authority, the Federal Capital Territory, and several other departments. A source within the investigative committee revealed that Mr. Jonathan and his closest aides and political appointees made illegal withdrawals of funds to finance his failed bid for re-election.
Former Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has stated that former President Jonathan asked her to withdraw more than $1.2 billion from the excess crude account. Even though Mrs. Okonji-Iweala continues to maintain publicly that she did nothing wrong during her tenure, a source told SaharaReporters that the former minister, who coordinated economic affairs during the former president’s tenure, has been quietly cooperative with the Buhari administration. According to the source, Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala has offered what amounts to a dossier of corrupt deals authorized by the former president.
In an attempt to curry favor with the new government, Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala recently directed officials of her polling agency, NOI Polls, to give President Buhari a 70% approval rating among Nigerians. “The polling results were simply cooked up,” a professional pollster told SaharaReporters. Prior to the 2015 general elections, the former minister’s fake polling organization kept repeating that Mr. Jonathan approval rating was up even as his political fortune plummeted.
SaharaReporters also learned that former Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke, is also actively cooperating with the Buhari administration. As earlier revealed, Mrs. Alison-Madueke had struck a deal with the new government to submit a document to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) exposing her collaborators at the NNPC. The former Petroleum minister, who was one of the closest cabinet members to Mr. Jonathan—and the mastermind of numerous money laundering deals on behalf of the former president—currently shuttles between the UK and Switzerland.
A source at the Presidency revealed that Mr. Buhari was not receptive to Mr. Anyaoku’s pleas. According to the source, the president told the former Commonwealth chief executive that the massive theft of funds by officials of the previous administration had robbed him of funds to start meeting his promises to the Nigerian people.
“The president’s concern is for everybody who stole funds, including the former president, to disclose their willingness to return their loot to the Nigerian people,” the source added.
0 comments:
Post a Comment