The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) on Thursday said that some serving and past governors were being investigated for corrupt practices that have reportedly robbed their states of huge sums of public funds.
The Acting Chairman of the Commission, Mr Ibrahim Magu, while briefing the media at a ceremony in his office to mark the 2020 Democracy Day, said the probe of those governors by EFCC, whose names he did not give, was borne out of numerous petitions filed against them by individuals and groups pertaining to the looting of public funds.
Magu also mentioned the success story of the commission in the last five years, indicating that it recovered several assets believed to have been acquired with public funds by powerful and influential but corrupt Nigerians with public funds.
The chairman disclosed that within the same period the anti-graft agency secured no fewer than 2,240 convictions and recovered at least N980 billion for the Federal and state governments.
Additionally, Magu said that the commission had within the same period seized many properties suspected to have been acquired with stolen public funds such as estates, ships, petrol stations, schools, hotels, shopping malls, and jewelleries and will soon expose the suspects behind the looting by charging them to court.
Magu said: “As you all know in your regular reporting the EFCC is not only ahead, it is clearly so. We are on course in all the cases we are prosecuting. Our scorecard in the area of conviction is 2,240 in the last five years.
“We have recovered assets in excess of N980 billion and quite a large array of non-monetary assets like properties, estates, private jets, oil vessels, filling stations, schools; hotels; trucks and other automobiles; pieces of jewellery; plazas, shopping malls, electronics, among others.
Almost on a daily basis, we receive very serious petitions against serving and former governors. One of them alleged a sitting governor diverted huge public funds from the state’s treasury for a personal cause and we are on the matter. We have many of such cases against past and serving governors,” the chairman announced.
