Following the revelation that the missing $2.1billion arms deal was from the return Abacha loot, Edo state governor Adams Oshiomole has reiterated the need to probe the immediate past Fiance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iwela. Oshiomole made this call while speaking to state house correspondents after a meeting with President Buhari at the state house yesterday, December 9. “The NSA is supposed to be an advisory officer. He is not supposed to be a procurement agent for government. I am happy the figures are coming out and I know that this is a tip of the iceberg and I read some reports, the numbers are in billions, Dasuki is just one bleeding point; there are several bleeding points in the system.
“You look at the total number of expenditure on subsidy which the World Bank has just released figures; about how many trillions of Naira over the past four to five years. I am shocked. I have been talking about it, I just said to a couple of persons, the government has to go the whole hog, because I know as a governor that no money gets out of the treasury even after I have approved as the governor without the approval of the Commissioner for Finance; so the probe should go into whether all these monies are appropriated all of it; when the money got out of the treasury, through who?
“The Minister of Finance under the rules must endorse before money gets out of the treasury, before the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) approves. So for the Ministers of Finance, including Okonjo – Iweala, I don’t care what people say because you cannot be coordinating a corruption-ridden economy and you pretend to be an angel, you cannot selectively deal with issues; you must deal with all involved in the conspiracy.
“In criminal law when two to three people are involved in a act of criminality, all of them are charged with conspiracy. Now if you lay your hands on the various appropriation bills passed by the National Assembly and see how much the National Assembly appropriated for subsidy for all those periods, you will find out they are not even up to half of what was spent. This means that money not appropriated for was spent. If people are involved in those acts, they must be brought to justice,” he said.
Recall that Oshiomole in an earlier interview with Leadership, said the former Minister must be prosecuted for allowing such huge scam occur under her nose. The former minister in turn had replied Oshiomole, asking the federal government to call the governor to order, underlying that she has absolutely nothing to do with the matter. Okonjo-Iweala also threatened to sue the governor and his cohorts.