President Muhammadu Buhari is wasting no time in tracking Nigeria’s looted money stashed in numerous European countries and the US with the aim of recovering and repatriating such funds illegally appropriated by the previous government.
President Buhari, having been elected on an anti-corruption platform, promised to clamp down on corruption in the government institutions and recover looted government money. According to presidency sources, the federal government has now specifically targeted the US, UK, France, Switzerland and several other countries where it believes corrupt officials have been stashing public funds.
According to the presidential spokesman Femi Adesina, “The next three months may be hard but billions of dollars can be recovered and we will do our best. The search will not only cover the UK, US, Switzerland, Germany and other known havens for Nigerian looted funds but will cover everywhere under the sun.
“Anywhere and everywhere that the looted funds are, we have an assurance from the United States of America to assist us to repatriate these funds from anywhere under the sun. Everything that needs to be done to get all those funds repatriated will be done, including engaging private investigators.”
Looted funds from Nigeria have been kept in the past in several countries including Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the UK, US, France, Germany, British Virgin Islands and other tax havens. Buhari’s administration intend to conduct investigations which will identify the individuals who engaged in corrupt practices and ascertain the sums of money involved with a view to repatriating them.
The president laments the fact that past government officialls jettisoned all financial and administrative instructions put in place in parastatals and agencies while embracing impunity, lack of accountability and financial recklessness in the management of national resources. Mr Adesina said the identification of foreign banks being used to stash stolen funds was one of the agreements reached between President Buhari and President Barak Obama at the recent G-7 summit in Germany.
Mr Adesina concluded: “When the president met with the G7, the promise that the American president gave him was that Nigeria should just provide all the facts, the figures, the statistics, including the banks. He promised that if Nigeria could make the information available, then the US will help in recovering the stolen funds.”
“In fact, the president said the government will spend the next three months identifying banks, individuals and monies that have been ferried out of this country. The assurance the president has given is that within the next three months, we have to concentrate on getting those monies back to the government coffers.”
The United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) has alerted President Buhari on over N1.3tn stolen during the last administration, where it is kept and who the beneficiaries are. According to the DFID, the money is a low hanging fruit that the president can pluck during his first six months in the office with the help of the UK, US, and other G7 members without hassle.
