Nigeria’s anti-graft agency on Monday said it has recovered over N2.5 billion illegal payment in the bank account of a deceased staff of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture.
Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission boss Bolaji Owasanoye was at the second National Summit on Diminishing Corruption in Abuja.
Owasanoye said about N16 billion was recovered from the ministry of agriculture. The money he said was paid to an individual account for non-official purposes.
In the same ministry, the ICPC said it uncovered several payouts made to contractors for doing nothing. There were cases of inflated payments to contractors.
Owasanoye said the assets including 18 buildings, 12 business premises, and 25 plots of land were recovered from the ministry.
But it was not only the agric ministry that was indicted.
He said under Open Treasury Portal review carried out between January to August 15, 2020, out of 268 Ministries, Departments and Agendas (MDAs) 72 of them had cumulative infractions of N90 million.
He said while 33 MDAs tendered explanations that N4.1 billion was transferred to sub-TSA, N4.2 billion paid to individuals had no satisfactory explanations.
“We observed that transfers to sub-TSA was to prevent disbursement from being monitored. Nevertheless, we discovered payments to some federal colleges for school feeding in the sum of N2.67 billion during lockdown when the children are not in school, and some of the money ended up in personal accounts. We have commenced investigations into these finding,” Owasanoye said.
The ICPC chairman also said under its 2020 constituency and executive projects tracking initiative, 722 projects with a threshold of N100 million (490 ZiP and 232 executives) were tracked across 16 states.
The ICPC chairman said in the education sector, 78 MDAs were reviewed and common cases of misuse of funds were uncovered.
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