The Peoples Democratic Party has alleged that the Central Bank of Nigeria under its suspended Governor, Mallam Sanusi Lamido, gave the All Progressives Congress N1bn to open its offices nationwide.
It therefore demanded a detailed forensic audit of all the accounts and financial activities of the CBN from 2009 till date when Sanusi was appointed.
Though efforts to get Sanusi’s comment failed, a close aide to the suspended CBN governor, who pleaded anonymity, said the allegation was not true. “It is a false assertion. The press should insist that the PDP should provide evidence. It is not true.”
But in a statement by the National Publicity Secretary of the PDP, Olisa Metuh, on Sunday, the ruling party also demanded that the audit must establish and publish all the movements of funds from the CBN accounts such as contract sums, donations and other extra-budgetary spending under Sanusi.
Metuh said the audit would reveal all contracts awarded by the bank within the period, the beneficiary companies and persons as well as the value of the contracts and their status of execution.
Metuh said from the investigations carried out by the party, the APC and some of its members were beneficiaries of the “siphoned CBN money surreptitiously diverted to them by the suspended CBN governor.”
Asserting that a fraudulent N48bn contract was awarded to a leader of the APC while N5bn was further paid to another stalwart of the party as consultancy fee.
Metuh said the bank also diverted over “N1bn to the APC to open offices across the nation in addition to N100m donated to some leaders of the APC to fund their activities last year.”
Metuh insisted that the audit must expose the true beneficiaries of the over N150bn doled out as developmental donations because some of the institutions listed as beneficiaries including Bayero University, Kano had denied receiving the money recorded against their names by the CBN. It noted that BUK was widely reported to have announced that it received only N1bn as against the N4bn claimed by the apex bank.
Apart from this, Metuh added that his “party as well as other well-meaning Nigerians were particularly worried by allegations that such funds might have actually ended up as a financial support to clandestine groups working against the unity and corporate existence of the nation.”
The APC has however described the PDP’s allegation “as utter rubbish coming from a daft party” and asked Nigerians to ignore the allegation.
Apart from this, it said that the plan of the PDP was to divert attention of Nigerians from the missing $20bn from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation accounts.
The Interim National Publicity Secretary of the APC, Lai Mohammed, who spoke to our correspondent on the telephone, said that though he was not aware of any of the members of the APC that won contracts under Sanusi, he wondered whether it was also wrong for any Nigerian to get a contract from the Federal Government.
He said Nigerians would want to know if only PDP members were entitled to getting contracts from the Federal Government.
Mohammed said, “It is an allegation that can only come from a daft person aiming at distracting Nigerians from the real issue of the missing $20bn.
“We don’t know of any of our members that got contracts from the CBN, but this can only be an issue if such contract were not executed.”
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