The Executive Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) Ola Olukoyede has stated that whistleblowers who offer information on assets kept abroad in any part of the world by corrupt Nigerians stand to get a reward of between 2.5 and 5% of the recovered loot.
He therefore called on whistleblowers across the world to offer useful and actionable intelligence to the Commission on monetary and non-monetary assets stashed abroad by corrupt Nigerians.
He made this call on Wednesday while delivering a lecture at the Cambridge International Symposium on Economic Crime in the United Kingdom.
According to him, any whistleblower that is privy to where Nigerian assets are kept abroad could come forward to assist the country in recovering them. This initiative, he said, would come with juicy rewards.
“I welcome all of you to the world of whistleblowing. If any one of you is privy to where Nigerian assets are stolen or taken to anywhere in the world, we have an incentive for you; between 2.5% and 5%, it’s going to go back to you upon recovery. That is an incentive we have put in place to encourage people to come forward to give information about stolen assets.
You never tell if you give any information here, some of you may leave this place, multi-millionaire in your lifetime”, he said.
The EFCC’s boss pointed out that in less than three years of assuming office as head of a Nigerian anti-graft agency, the Commission had recovered more than half a billion dollars for the Nigerian government.
“Within three years of my assumption of office, we’ve been able to forfeit both cash and assets worth over half a billion dollars to the government,” he said.
The recovery of the assets, he said, could be linked to the resourcefulness and professionalism of EFCC’s investigators, virile judiciary and access to credible intelligence. He linked the non-conviction-based asset forfeiture approach in Nigeria to what is obtainable in Australia and Canada. The framework, he explained, allowed the Commission to seek forfeiture of assets suspected to be proceeds of crime without waiting for a criminal conviction.
“We have similar to what is obtainable in Australia and Canada that empowers us to apply the forfeiture to proceeds of what is suspected to be proceeds of crime,” he said. Through the approach the anti-graft czar told his audience that an aircraft, a university, estates and houses suspected to be proceeds of crime had been forfeited to the government.
He particularly mentioned the 752 housing units recovered from a former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Godwin Emefiele and the investigations of a former Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, SAN, which yielded the forfeiture of 48 out of the 57 houses suspected to be proceeds of corrupt practices.
“Sometimes last year, I opened investigations upon reasonable suspicion of criminal abuse of office by the immediate past attorney-general of Nigeria. We discovered that within eight years of his being in office, we were able to trace about 57 such properties to him. We’ve been able to forfeit about 48”, he said.
The 43th International symposium on economic crime holding in Cambridge is an annual event bringing together anti-corruption experts from across the world. Olukoyede’s presentation came on the third day of the weeklong event.
(Ripples)