President Buhari has decided to extend the investigation of corrupt practices beyond Jonathan’s administration as there are indications that those administrations before Jonathan’s began the scheme of adding non-exiting projects to budget
According to Vanguard, the probe is expected to begin from 1999 when Nigeria returned to democratic rule.
According to a report, top politicians used their influences to smuggle projects into the budgets of many parastatals and browbeat their heads to transfer the money meant for such schemes to them under an agreed sharing formula.
Abubakar Malami who is the attorney general of the federation said his office in conjunction with security agencies was working to bring those who brought non-existing projects into budgets to siphon money.
He said: “The aim of the investigation was to prosecute those who aided and abetted politicians to defraud the nation of scarce resources and deny the citizens of basic services. The federal government is interested in fishing out and punishing all those heads of parastatals who allowed themselves to be used by influential persons in the executive and legislative arms of government by smuggling non-existing projects into successive budgets and making away with large sums of money budgeted for them,”
“You will recall that over time there has been this criminal conspiracy among some levels of government resulting in budget padding by many of the parastatals and the money diverted and shared by some powerful individuals to the detriment of majority of Nigerians, who have been denied vital services. The present administration has taken note of the painful antics of a few powerful elements and we have decided to fish them out and punish them for others to see that corruption is not in the interest of anybody in Nigeria.”
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