The House of Representatives Committee on Public Petitions yesterday has issued warrant of arrest on Olayemi Cardoso, governor of the Central Bank; Oluwatoyin Madein, the Accountant General of the Federation; and 17 others for refusing to appear to answer questions on their operations.
Michaël Irom, the chairman of the Committee mandated the Inspector General of Police (IGP) to ensure the officials slated for arrest were brought before the Committee on December 14.
This resolution is sequel to the adoption of a motion moved by Fred Agbedi at the committee’s hearing session on yesterday.
In his submission, Agbedi said the arrest warrant had become inevitable following the attitude of those invited MDAs, lamenting that the CEOs had been invited four times, but failed to respond.
Agbedi warned that the CEOs recommend that the CEOs arrested and brought before the committee by the Inspector General of Police through a warrant of arrest after due diligence by the Speaker, Tajudeen Abbas.
Fidelis Uzowanem, the petitioner informed that the petition was anchored on the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) report of 2021.
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“We took up the challenge to examine the report and discovered that what NEITI put together is only consolidation of fraud that has been going on in the oil and gas industry.
“It dates back to 2016 because we have been following and we put up a petition to this committee to examine what has happened.
He maintained that the 2024 budget of 27.5 trillion that has been proposed can be confidently funded from the recoverable amount that they identified in the NEITI report.
Uzowanem said it is basically a concealment of illegal transactions that took place in NNPCL; they have been in a sink with some oil companies where some companies that did not produce crude were paid cash core, an amount paid for crude oil production.
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