The Human and Environmental Development Agenda (HEDA) has asked the Lagos state house of assembly not to assume the position of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) in the probe of its speaker.
According to HEDA, a petition has been submitted to EFCC to investigate Mudashiru Obasa, the Lagos assembly speaker, who has been accused of embezzling public funds and abuse of office.
The house of assembly set up a panel to probe the allegations against the speaker following reports of his said misdeeds.
While appearing before the panel, Obasa denied the allegations.
In a letter to the house of assembly following an invitation to the agency to appear before the panel, Olanrewaju Suraju, HEDA chairman, said there is no way justice would prevail because the speaker constituted a committee made up of his loyalists to probe him.
HEDA said its petition to the EFCC subsists and that the speaker and its panel should not assume they can take over the work of the anti-graft institution.
“The speaker, Mudashiru Obasa, whose second term has been marred in a string of corruption charges is using the house investigation committee as a smokescreen to unchain the speaker,” he said.
“The outcome of the panel is predictable; Obasa will be cleared by his friends fronting as investigators. The panel set up by the Lagos state house of assembly is made up of the cronies of the speaker. There is no way justice will be delivered to the people of Lagos whose resources Obasa was said to have pillaged.”
Suraju said his organisation got its invitation to the investigative hearing few hours to the time the panel commenced its proceedings.
He said the house was wrong to have invited his organisation because they did not submit a petition to it.
“Considering the inherent fundamental flaws and procedural defects in the procedure, appointment of the committee, process of invitation and the shenanigans of the committee, we have decided that the committee does not deserve a response from our organisation,” he said.
“Your committee, via our official email address, sent an invitation to our organisation at 6.07pm on Wednesday, at a time when offices had closed, and requested our appearance before a committee at 10.00am the following day.
“A sincere, impartial and independent committee will never send an invitation to an individual and organisation for an appearance at the sitting of the committee with less than 24 hours notice, as was the case in this circumstance.
“The allegations against the speaker are criminal in nature and completely outside the parliamentary power of the assembly. We have directed these petitions to the appropriate law enforcement agencies for their actions.”