The minister of foreign affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama has said that the United States Government spied on the telephone calls of senior officials of the Goodluck Jonathan administration due to suspicious investments made by their cronies in the USA.
Speaking with State House correspondents in Abuja on Sunday, the foreign affairs minister said the revelation of the wire tappings came as a surprise to the Buhari administration.
Last July, one of the telephone conversations between former petroleum minister, Diezani Madueke and a business associate, Kola Aluko leaked.
In the conversation, Madueke admonished Aluko for buying a super yacht, warning him that his purchases would attract scrutiny from law enforcement.
Onyeama reacting to a question on how much money was stolen abroad said, “On the issue of how much is stolen from the country, it’s an ongoing thing, we have been discovering all the time because you see the sophistication that there is today in hiding money around the world is amazing, even western countries themselves have a lot of problems and it takes them a lot of time and they discovered about the Panama papers, nobody knew about all those funds illegally stashed until you suddenly have the revelations under the Panama papers. So it’s really an ongoing thing and then new ones coming up all the time.
“As you saw recently we never knew about the US eavesdropping on some telephone conversations of members of the previous government and private sectors talking about investments that were made in the United States, it just suddenly came out like that, so it’s an ongoing thing.”
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