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N90bn allegation: I will waive my constitutional immunity to prove my innocence – Osinbajo

Yemi Osinbajo

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has declared his readiness to waive his constitutional immunity to “enable the most robust adjudication” of several baseless allegations, insinuations and falsehoods against his person and office.

Osinbajo made this declaration in a tweet he personally authored Wednesday afternoon.
This is coming against the backdrop of allegation of N90 billion fraud involving the vice president.

In a tweet on Wednesday, Osinbajo described the allegations as “falsehood”.

“In the past few days, a spate of reckless and malicious falsehoods have been peddled in the media against me by a group of malicious individuals,” Osinbajo tweeted. “The defamatory and misleading assertions invented by this clique had mostly been making the social media rounds anonymously,” he said in the tweet.

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Osinbajo said he has “instructed the commencement of legal action against two individuals, one Timi Frank and another Katch Ononuju, who have put their names to these odious falsehoods”.
“I will waive my constitutional immunity to enable the most robust adjudication of these claims of libel and malicious falsehood,” he said.

The Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) had in a recent statement denied the allegations made by Timi Frank, former deputy national publicity secretary of the All Progressives Congress (APC), who claimed that the FIRS supported the APC through the Vice President Osinbajo with N90 billion.

In the statement by Wahab Gbadamosi, its head of Communications and Servicom Department, FIRS described the allegation as malicious and a calculated attempt to smear the image of the service and the vice president.

“This campaign of calumny and vilifying false claims are entirely libellous, unfounded, in fact, irresponsible and a brazen assault on the integrity of the Service as a responsible and accountable organisation and demonstrates an abysmal ignorance of the budgetary and expenditure process of the FIRS,” the testament said.

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“In the last four years since Mr. Tunde Fowler has supervised operations at the FIRS, the agency had not received up to N100 billion per annum as cost of collection from the Federation Accounts Allocation Committee (FAAC). FAAC is a public institution, whose records are open to the public,” it said.

The statement said it is from the remittances from FAAC, which had never grossed up to N100 billion per annum, that FIRS pays the salary and emoluments and trains its over 8,000 staff, runs over 150 offices and provides for other needs of the Service.

It said it is neither plausible nor does it make any sense “that FIRS will commit its resources to a phantom campaign of N90 billion as suggested by Mr. Timi Frank and FIRS does not fund political associations”.

 

Tony Ailemen, Abuja