The Economic and
Financial Crimes Commission had on July 10 slammed a 24-count charge on Messrs
Oronsaye, Maina and Osarenkhole Afe, a consultant who worked with the Task
Team, as well as his company, Fredrick Hamilton Global Services Limited, which
was used as conduit pipe to siphon funds from the pension unit of the HOSF’s
office.
Although Mr.
Maina is not listed as one of the respondents in the case, his name features
prominently in all the charges and he is being prosecuted along with the
others.
EFCC sources
indicate that his name is not listed among the respondents because “he is at
large and cannot be tried in absentia”.
Messrs Oronsaye,
Maina and the others are accused of using bogus or inflated biometrics
enrolment contracts, dubious “collective allowances” and other schemes to steal
money from the account in which pensioners’ funds were kept.
About N1 billion
is believed to have been illegally taken out of the pension funds at the
Pension Office of the office of the Head of Service for dubious biometric
enrolment contracts while more than N100 million is believed to have been
withdrawn in the name of collective allowances to staff of the pension
department travelling on official duty.
Even now,
investigators are still digging into the pension fund’s accounts, as it is
believed that more of the stolen funds would be discovered.
Specifically, the
accused persons allegedly awarded contracts for the conduct of biometric
enrolment of pensioners in several states to front companies owned by them,
their aides, friends and cronies.
The companies
include Fredrick Hamilton, Innovation Solutions and Projects Ltd, Xangee
Technologies and Fatidek Ventures. Others are Obalando Enterprises, Jolance
Integrated Concepts, Vivian Ebony Nig. Ltd, MOF Investments and Fesbee Global
Resources.
In some
instances, the contracts were just schemes for siphoning money as in reality,
no jobs were ever carried out yet monies were paid out to front companies which
then paid them back to the accused persons.
Mr. Oronsaye’s
sin is that as Head of Service, he approved the payments for the bogus
contracts and also allegedly benefitted from the graft as some of the stolen
funds were reportedly paid to him.
In fact, the
Permanent Secretary, Establishment and Record in the HOSF’s office, Charles
Bonat, who supervised the Pension Office, accused Oronsaye of usurping his
functions, including the signing of cheques.
Mr. Bonat, who
indicted Oronsaye for setting up the Task Team without a formal letter, terms
of reference or duration and for approving payments contrary to regulations,
said the former Head of Service “took away my duties and responsibilities which
he now assigned to the task team”.
The Permanent
Secretary, who has since retired, said further that Mr. Oronsaye also took from
him the role of being the accounting officer of the pension accounts by making
himself and others signatories to the accounts.
Others people
implicated Oronsaye in the monumental fraud are Phina Ukamaka Chidi, a former
deputy director at the Pension Office of the office of the Head of Service, who
has also been standing trial since last year for stealing billions from pensioners’
funds, and Salami Kareem Adesokan, a former stores officer at the Customs
Immigrations and Prisons Pension Office, CIPPO.
In 2011, Ms.
Chidi told investigators that shortly before Mr. Oronsaye retired as Head of
Service, she was asked by her boss, the director in the Pension Office of the
office of the Head of Service, Teidi Shaibu, who is also being prosecuted for
pension fraud, to source for companies to be used siphoning funds for Mr.
Oronsaye using bogus contracts.
The plan, she
said, was to award bogus contracts to such companies, which would later return
the contract sums to Mr. Oronsaye.
“I was asked by
Dr Shaibu to source for company names to execute some contracts the proceeds of
which should be given to Mr. Oronsaye as the Head of Service then. The proceeds
had been given to Oronsaye,” Chidi claimed in her statement to the EFCC on
January 1, 2011.
“When the money
came in from the contract from Olanipekun, he used to give to Ikenna in Zenith
and Benni in UBA for safe custody before they were given to Dr Shaibu to give
the former HOS Mr. Oronsaye,” Ms. Chidi revealed.
She added that
such bogus contracts were thus awarded to about 60 companies for sums ranging
from N4 million to N15 milion.
In his own
statement to investigators, Mr. Adesokan alleged that he was also used to
siphon money from pension accounts as he was asked to seek companies to be used
to receive monies for contracts that were never awarded or executed.
Mr. Adesokan used
three companies, Fatidek Ventures, Obalando Enterprises and Jolance Integrated
Concepts, and the three firms received a total N147, 019,800 for non-existent
contracts. In his statement, he claimed that he was instructed by Mr. Maina to
withdraw the money and give it to His (Mr. Maina’s) secretary, Anne Igwe, who
later delivered it to her boss.
However, Mr.
Adesokan also claimed that each time he withdrew money and handed over to Igwe
for delivery to Mr. Maina, he noticed that the money was usually moved to Mr.
Oronsaye’s vehicle at the car park of the office of the Head of Service.
“When the money
were collected and handed over to Anne Igwe, Mr. Maina’s secretary, I used to
noticed the onward movement of these money again to Oronsaye, the then Head of
Civil Service of the Federation, through his then Special Assistant in person
of Ayo Otepola and Oronsaye’s driver,” he said.
He added that he
was able to notice such movements of cash because “during 6.30 pm to 8 pm
because this time I used to be in the mosque by this time and the mosque was
such located that you will see anybody entering Block D of the Phase 11 of the
federal secretariat.”
“I normally see
the handling and movement of bags popularly known as Ghana Must Go,” he further
stated.
However, the case
against Mr. Oronsaye peters into insignificance compared to the accusations
against Mr. Maina, who was appointed by Mr. Oronsaye in 2010 to reform the
pension administration at the office of the Head of Service.
As chairman of
the Pension Reform Task Team, Mr. Maina had unearthed the monumental looting of
funds from the pension funds and blown the whistle on the likes of Messrs
Shaibu and Chidi, which led to their prosecution.
Now, Mr. Maina is
accused of doing exactly as the people he exposed by looting close to a billion
naira from money meant for the payment of pensioners.
Several of those
who were part of the scheme orchestrated to steal the money have already
confessed their role and all pointed at Mr. Maina as the architect of the
monumental fraud.
The first scheme
allegedly employed by Mr. Maina was the biometric enrolment of pensioners
across the states, which he demanded in order to sift out fake pensioners. But
in most cases, it was alleged, no biometric exercise was conducted, instead
contracts were awarded and the monies routed back to Mr. Maina.
The first
biometric contract that got Messrs Maina and Oronsaye into trouble was awarded
in June 2010 to Innovative Solutions, a company introduced to the office of the
Head of Service by Mr. Afe, a respondent in the case. The contract was worth
N63, 375,000 (sixty three million, three hundred and seventy five thousand
naira).
Although many
things were wrong with the process of bidding for this contract, Oronsaye
approved it and the contract sum was paid to the contractor. It was later
discovered that the said job was carried out at the sum of N35 million by
Uptrach Communications Limited and not Innovative Solutions.
The chief
executive officer of Innovative Solutions confessed under interrogation that
Uptrach Communications did the job for N35 million and that it was Mr. Afe who
instructed him to work with the company and Fredrick Hamilton, which he (Afe)
owns.
Afe told
investigators that the remaining N28 million was split between Maina, Otepola
(Oronsaye’s Special Assistant), another director in the office of the Head of
Service, Karamot Lawal and himself.
But that is just
the tip of the iceberg for what would later become a looting spree. After the
initial biometric enrolment exercise, Innovative Solutions requested for an
extension of the exercise and therefore demanded the payment of extra N136
million. Mr. Afe later confessed that he was instructed by Mr. Maina to ask the
company to seek the extension of the exercise for that amount, bringing the
total cost of the biometric enrolment contract to N199 million.
However,
investigators discovered that the second contract for N136 was never awarded
but was a scheme to siphon money. Moreover, rather than being paid a total of
N199, Innovative Solutions ended up being paid N224 million, with an excess of
N25 million. In all, the company fraudulently received a total of N161.4
million.
According to Mr.
Afe, the scheme to illegally pay N161.4 million to Innovative Solutions was
orchestrated by Mr. Maina who also ended up being the sole beneficiary of that
monumental fraud.
According to
statements made by Mr. Afe, Innovative Solutions paid his own company, Fredrick
Hamilton, a total of N155, 147,000 from the N161.4 million it received.
“After the
exercise, Innovative Solutions Limited transferred the sum of 155.147 million
to my Fredrick Hamilton account. I handed these funds over to Mr Maina.
“I wrote blank
cheques to disburse the funds in the presence of my Oceanic Bank account
officer (name withheld) on 8 July 2010,” he further stated.
Apart from this,
Fredrick Hamilton also got paid another N119 million ostensibly for executing a
biometric enrolment contract. Yet, there is no existing documentation regarding
this contract for which payment was made.
However, in his
statement, Mr. Afe, the owner of the company claimed that N35 million of the
amount was payment for his project management consultancy job and that the
balance was paid entirely in cash to Mr. Maina.
“The difference
made here was at the instruction of Mr Maina and the funds were given to him in
cash at my bank, Oceanic Bank, NAOWA Complex branch, Abuja,” Afe said.
However,
investigators believe Mr. Afe lied about earning N35 million since no such
contract was ever awarded, insisting that the entire N119 million was
deliberately illegally siphoned.
In all, it was
discovered that MR. Afe’s company, Fredrick Hamilton had illegally received
payments totalling N280.05 million. In his statement to the EFCC, he claimed
that he paid over N250 million to Maina.
The EFCC also
alleges that Mr. Maina used other people and companies to siphon funds from the
pension accounts of the Pension Office at the Head of Service.
One of the
persons Mr. Maina allegedly used was Mr. Adesokan, who worked with him while he
was director of CIIPO.
Mr. Adesokan used
his company, Fatidek Ventures, to obtain bogus biometric enrolment and file
jacket supply contracts totalling more than N30 million from the Head of
Service’s Pension Office. But it was a ruse. There was no contract at all.
Mr. Adesokan confessed
under interrogation that the N30, 056,000 obtained by Fatidek Ventures for the
bogus supply contract was paid to Igwe, Mr. Maina’s secretary.
Mr. Adesokan also
confessed using other companies to obtain other bogus contracts from the
Pension Office.
According to him,
these include, Jolance Integrated Concepts and Obalando, both owned by his
friends.
“Jolance was
awarded feeding contract to the tune of N20,000,000 but actually the company
was not the one that provided feeding during the exercise,” he stated.
He further stated
that the N20 million was also handed over to Anne Igwe as verbally directed by
Abdulrasheed Maina.
Obalando, the
other company used by Adesokan, got three bogus biometric enrolment contracts
for N52,600,000, N9,925,400 and N32,240,000, all totalling N96,765,400. The
entire sum, Adesokan said he was instructed to withdraw and hand over to Mr.
Igwe by Mr. Maina, which he did.
Another civil
servant used in siphoning money from pension accounts at the office of the Head
of Service was Bonat’s secretary, Kate Chinwe Obiekwe, who was personally paid
N56 million in the name of collective allowance and biometric enrolment. She
claimed that most of the money was withdrawn by her and paid to the secretary
of the Task Team, Ibrahim Abdulkareem, whom she said in turn handed it over to
Mr. Igwe, Mr. Maina’s secretary.
Ms. Obiekwe added
that Abdulkareem also asked her to provide her company’s account details to
receive payments for biometric enrolment contracts. She provided her company, Vivian
Ebony’s account details, and the company got N16, 786,000 but Ms. Obiekwe
claimed that she also withdrew and handed over the money to Mr. Abdulkareem.
For her services, she claimed to have been paid the sum of N50, 000. Other than
payments for biometric enrolment, another avenue that was allegedly used by Mr.
Maina to siphon money from the pension funds was what was known as collective
allowance.
These are
allowances due to civil servants on official assignment outside Abuja with the
voucher raised in one person’s name. It is alleged that names of staff of the
Pension Office were drawn up as due for collective allowance for which monies
running into several millions of naira were illegally paid out. But in truth,
no official ever travelled rather it was a scheme designed to siphon money from
the pension funds.
The names of
several officials of the Task Team headed by Mr. Maina and other civil servants
in the office of the Head of Service were used to siphon money this way.
Part of the N50
million paid to Ms. Obiekwe was received as collective allowance. In all, she
must have received about N15 million into her personal account. She confessed
that the money was not used for paying collective allowance to officials on
duty outside Abuja rather was expended on such things as purchasing “office
consumables,” “running the office”, helping staff and old pensioners return
back home after coming to Abuja to pursue their pension and so on.
Mr. Abdulkareem
was also discovered to have received a total of N80 million as collective
allowance from the pension funds, while another staff of the Pension Reform
Task Team, Mohammed Abdullahi, also allegedly collected more than N20 million
for the same purpose.
When EFCC
investigators confronted him with the allegations against him, Mr. Oronsaye
denied all of them. First, he said that he was not the accounting officer of
the pension office, insisting that Mr. Bonat held that responsibility.
Mr. Oronsaye also
denied knowledge of about N500 million and another $2 million being held in
trust for him as alleged by Ms. Chidi.
“I am told that
$2 million and about N500 million are being held in trust for me by Mrs Chidi
to be delivered to me at a later date. This is news to me. I could never be
part of this,” Oronsaye stated, adding that he had never collected any money
from her.
Regarding the
illegal payment of N224 million to Innovative Solutions for a N63 million
contract, the former Head of Service said he was advised on the importance of
the biometric exercise by Afe, adding that the contract went through the
tenders board, although he could not recollect if it was advertised as required
by procurement laws.
Ms. Oronsaye
denied knowledge of the N136 million contract for the extension of the
biometric exercise and the other contract for the sum of N119 paid to Fredrick
Hamilton, Afe’s company.
In Mr. Maina’s
case, our reporter was able to reach him through his cell phone at his base in
Dubai, where he has lived for about two years now. He denied any wrong doing
while in office as chairman of the Pension Reform Task Team, insisting that
there was an agenda to tarnish his record as the man who saved more than N282
billion that would have been stolen.
He denied
collecting monies from Mr. Afe, who alleged that he gave him more than N250
million.
“You say somebody
said he gave 15 blank cheques to me. So, how did I cash them? Can’t they go to
the bank and find out? Come on,” he said. When told that one of the contractors
alleged that he issued him blank cheques to collect N119 million.
Mr. Maina
insisted that it was because the EFCC had found no evidence against him that
they failed to list him as one of the respondents in the case.
He also pointed
out that the EFCC had not been fair to him as the Commission never invited him
concerning any of the allegations levelled against him. When he was told that
the anti-graft agency had informed our reporter that it had invited him through
Ms. Igwe, his secretary, he said that only showed the agency was up to some
tricks.
“How can they
invite me through Anne. Don’t they know my house? Is Anne my mother? Am I in
the civil service? Is Anne still my secretary?” he queried.
“How can they say
I absconded? Did they invite me? They never invited me.”
Mr. Maina
insisted that anytime money was collected for biometrics, it was judiciously
used, noting that even officials of the EFCC travelled for the exercise and
received payments due to them.
He also wondered
how the EFCC would turn round and charge him of stealing from the pension funds
when he blew the whistle on all those that are now being tried, observing that
his team and the EFCC worked together in unravelling the rot in the pension
administration at the office of the Head of Service and the Police Pension
Office. The former Task Team chairman said that he had nothing to fear and that
he was returning to Nigeria soon and would therefore be waiting for the
investigators.
For many
Nigerians who have followed the unearthing of the corruption that characterised
pension funds administration in the country, the allegations must come as a
rude shock. And the irony of the situation would also not be lost on them.
It was, indeed,
Mr. Oronsaye who in 2010 set up the Pension Reform Task Team and invited Maina,
then head of CIIPO, to cleanse the Pension Office in the office of the HOSC
In his statement
to the EFCC, Mr. Oronsaye said he set up the task team to reform the pension
system “as a result of the many pensioners who clustered around the office of
Head of Service saying they had not received their entitlements.
Mr. Maina rose to
prominence as an anti-corruption czar when he uncovered the massive looting of
pensioners’ funds first in the HOSF’s office and later at the Police Pension
Office, PPO.
The disclosure by
the Maina – led Task Team uncovered the looting of some N40 billion at the
HOSF’s office and led to the prosecution of Messrs Shaibu, Chidi and 30 other
persons slammed with a 134-count charge of conspiracy, fraud and corruption.
(Read our report
on that monumental fraud here)
Also, at the
Police Pension Office, the task team discovered another N20 billion fraud
perpetrated by top civil servants and their aides.
In that case,
investigations showed that between 2008 and June 2011, the civil servants, in
the name of the director of the Police Pension Office, illegally withdrew a
total of N18.1 billion from Police pension funds using some 13,874 check
leaflets.
They did not even
bother to disguise their criminal activities by awarding contracts or making
payments to ghost pensioners as others did instead just wrote cheques payable
to the director in the pension office.
Those who were
arrested and are being prosecuted include Abubakar Kigo, former director, PPO,
who retired as a permanent secretary in the ministry of Niger Delta; Esias
Dangabar a retired director, PPO; Ahmed Wada, former deputy director, PPO, and
Abdullahi Umar, deputy director, Ministry of Works. Others are John Yusuf, an
accountant and a lady named Vicky, a cashier, both of whom worked in the PPO.
(Read details of
our report published on February 27, 2012 here)
In all, the Task
Team is also said to have saved the nation about N282 billion which would have
been stolen by the pension thieves.
Mr. Maina is now
being accused of borrowing the looting template employed by the pension
looters, through bogus or inflated contracts, brazen issuance of cheques to
persons for jobs not done and in the name of collective allowances.
These were the
same methods unearthed by Maina as having been used by Shaibu and others to
loot pension funds.
When the former
Task Team chairman spoke to our reporter on the phone on August 2, he said that
he was ready to defend himself and indicated that he would be returning to
Nigeria the following week. But three weeks later, at the time of filing this
report, he still had not returned home.
