The Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ola Olukoyede, has said a sum of N60 billion and $10 million have been recovered as loot by the agency since he assumed office.
He added that the anti-graft agency received over 5,000 fraud petitions, adding that 3,000 of them had been approved for investigation.
Olukoyede made this known on Saturday in Lagos while speaking as a guest lecturer at a 20th-anniversary lecture of the Human and Environmental Development Agenda Resources Centre (HEDA).
He said, “When we set out to investigate, people saw it as a fight between EFCC and the rest of us. It should not be so. How much will the EFCC do?
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“How much will the ICPC do with its staff strength? I have less than 4,800 staff. I am talking of an agency that is serving people who are over 150 million.
“All we have to do is investigate and present the facts before the court. I will not be the one to give judgment. That is where we have collective responsibility. When you see something, you say something.
“The issue is we are working as if we are not working. Upon my assumption of office between then and now, I have received over 5,000 petitions. I am not talking of just the one we received, but the one that we have checked and we discovered that there was substance in it. That is just for one agency, the EFCC.
“As I am talking to you I have approved the investigation of over 3,000 cases in less than four months, but what is our capacity? How many staff do we have? What resources do I have access to?
“In less than four months, we secured convictions of 700 and recovered over N60 billion and over $10 million. If I am able to recover over N60 billion in less than 100 days, you can imagine how much has been stolen. I can tell you that for the billion that has been recovered, a trillion has been stolen.”
Calling on Nigerians to support the EFCC in the anti-corruption fight, the Chairman of HEDA, Olanrewaju Suraju, said, “We need an effective policing system with integrity, then the court must not continue to discharge persons with corruption cases still hanging on their necks.”
President Bola Tinubu appointed Olukoyede as the EFCC chairman on October 12, 2023, following the arrest and probe of his former boss, Abdurasheed Bawa.
Last month, the EFCC boss lamented corruption in the ranks of the commission, saying some of the officials were taking bribes.
He warned them to desist from the ignoble acts or face the music.
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