Guardian

A NEW twist has been added to the investigation into the alleged fraud in the pension administration under the chairman of the Presidential Pension Task Force Team, Abdulrasheed Maina, with the Senate Joint Committee on Establishment and State and Local Council Affairs threatening to summon the Inspector General of Police (IG), Mohammed Abubakar, over his failure to appear before the panel for testimony.

Chairman of the Senate Joint Committee on Establishment and Public Service and State and Local Council Administration, Aloysius Etok, who confirmed this yesterday said: “The Senate President, who is the number three citizen in this country, signed a warrant of arrest and the Inspector-General of Police ignored the order. This is very unfortunate, but the Senate is left with no other option than to invite the IG to come and explain why he could not arrest Maina. We want to know if Maina is above the law of the land. The IG must tell us his own fear and whether it is beyond his power to arrest Maina. We are seeking to know all these from the IG.

“In our committee’s report that was submitted to the Senate in June last year, which was adopted by the entire Senate, we said the continued existence of Maina’s task force is illegal and should be discontinued immediately because nowhere does any task force exist beyond six months. This was affirmed by the former Head of Service who appointed Maina, Chief Steve Orosanye; former Head of Service, Prof. Oladapo Afolabi, also said this. Likewise the incumbent Head of Service, Bello Sali, as well as the Minister of Finance.”

According to Etok: “We also said that Maina is a bad example in the public service and should be relieved of his appointment and prosecuted. He claimed that he has been spending N500 million monthly to pay police pension, and on our own, we discovered that he was spending between N600 million and N1 billion monthly to pay.   Therefore, we say the difference between N500 million and N1 billion is the margin of fraud and that he must return the money to government’s treasury. We calculated the money and it was over N9 billion. We’ve also stated in our report that we found Maina to have ridiculed the system by awarding contracts through splitting to the tune of N1.8 billion without any authorised approval.”

It would be recalled that the panel adjourned sine dine last December after it said Maina and IG failed to appear before it.