Our heritage reporters
A total of over N263,327,800 (Two hundred and sixty-three million, three hundred and twenty-seven thousand, eight hundred naira only) was on Tuesday handed over to the Kwara State Government by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
A statement issued by Spokesman of the EFCC, Tony Orilade, said the money, which was recovered by the anti-graft agency followed painstaking investigations.
The statement said the recovered funds was handed over to the State Governor, Abdulrahaman Abdul-Razak, by the Head of the Zone, Isyaku Sharu at the commission’s office in Ilorin, the state capital.
Sharu revealed that the money was recovered from suspected looters of the state’s treasury.
He said: “The money was siphoned from KWIRS and 16 Local Government Areas of the state.”
He further explained that about N5 billion was siphoned from KWIRS and shared in the ratio of 30/70 percent by some notable individuals in the state through their cronies.
He said: “We have 48 convictions and the worth of recovered assets, both at interim and final forfeiture is in excess of N8.5 billion.
“The mandate given to the Commission is to conduct holistic and all-inclusive clean-up of fraud and pen robbery, and we will not relent in doing this.”
Receiving the recovered fund, Governor Abdul-Razak promised to utilize the money judiciously.
He said: “The money I received today is N263,327,800, while the last recovered fund was N210 million.
“This fund will be used to augment the budget, social development and the remaining will be used for paying state government debt to federal government on the SME programme.”
He further revealed that the previous administration in the state, took a loan of N2 billion from the Federal Government to implement SME programmes, but nothing was accounted for, as most of it was basically stolen.
It will be recalled that the Ilorin zonal office had in October last year handed over the sum of N112million cash recovered from thieves of the state treasury and handed over the state government.
