The Economic and Financial Crimes
Commission has been grilling a former Senior Special Assistant to
ex-President Goodluck Jonathan on Public Affairs, Dr. Doyin Okupe, for
the last one week for allegedly receiving N85m from embattled former
National Security Adviser, Col. Sambo Dasuki (retd.)
The EFCC, however, did not detain him
but afforded him the privilege of coming from home due to a heart
condition Okupe reportedly suffers.
Apart from allegedly receiving money
from Dasuki, the former presidential aide is also accused of receiving
dubious contracts to the tune of N76m from a local council in Niger
State.
According to investigators at the
anti-graft agency, Okupe was first invited on June 22, 2016 over fresh
allegations bordering on illicit payments received from the account of
the Office of the National Security Adviser, which is domiciled at the
Central Bank of Nigeria.
A source at the EFCC said, “Okupe was
quizzed over N50m which he collected in cash from the former NSA,
without record or accountability. Another company that is linked to
Okupe, Abraham Telecoms Limited, allegedly received N35.5m from the NSA
through the CBN.
“We also got evidence that a company
owned by him, Romic Soil Fix International Limited, received N63m from
Chanchaga Local Government council of Niger State and another N13.5m
from the same council, for reasons that are not stated.
“We were told that the payments from
Chanchaga Local Government to Romic were made on November 21, 2014,
during the Peoples Democratic Party’s primary election and February 13,
2015, just before the general elections.
“He has not been able to explain the
receipts and has been asked to be reporting at intervals. The reason he
is not detained is because he claimed to have a heart condition and
presented a medical report to back up the claim.”
It will be recalled that Okupe had
openly confessed on his official Twitter handle on May 7 that he
received money from Dasuki on several occasions for the running of his
office.
Okupe, who served under Jonathan from
2012 to 2015, however, said he had nothing to do with the arms scam
which reportedly cost the country over $15bn in stolen funds.
Okupe said, “I was not paid arms deal
money. The NSA paid for the running of my office monthly from August
2012. Dasukigate was in 2014. I did not take part in the campaign.”
It had been reported in January that Okupe got money from Dasuki in three shady cyber security contracts.
One of the contracts had instructions to hunt down unfriendly media websites with Distributed Denial of Service attacks.
It was believed to be a project
conceived to shut down online media platforms perceived as friendly
towards Muhammadu Buhari, the then presidential candidate of the All
Progressives Congress ahead of the 2015 election.
The other contract was to intercept all
optic fibre cables landing in Nigeria. The third was a passive mass and
target GSM interception that had the ability to decrypt ciphers and
operate undetected.
No comments:
Post a Comment