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| EFCC Acting Chair, Ibrahim Magu |
Investigations by SaharaReporters indicate that the Acting Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Ibrahim Magu, is fighting the battle of his life against formidable forces in the Presidential Villa. This battle has to do with his confirmation as chairman of EFCC. Read the report below:
A cabal made up of high-level appointees in President Muhammadu
Buhari’s office has struck a deal with Senate President Bukola Saraki to
cease all forms of prosecution against him if he would agree to block
the confirmation of Ibrahim Magu as chairman of the Economic and
Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
Mr. Saraki has had a series of legal losses in his bid to stop his
multiple prosecutions for false asset declaration and money laundering.
The senator’s latest legal misfortune came earlier today when a panel of
the Court of Appeal dismissed his effort to stop his trial.
However, Mr. Buhari’s Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari, the
Director-General of the Department of State Services (DSS), Lawal Daura,
as well as the Attorney General of the Federal, Abubakar Malami are
conspiring to frustrate Mr. Saraki’s prosecution, according to a finding
of a lengthy investigation by our correspondent. Since his appointment
as the EFCC’s acting chairman, Mr. Magu has faced unusual impediments
from Mr. Kyari and other members of the cabal, all of them members of an
inner circle within the Presidency.
Our investigations revealed that Mr. Magu got on the bad side of the
president’s Chief of Staff when he refused to drop investigations
against Sahara Energy, a company in which Mr. Kyari has a substantial
interest. Mr. Magu also incurred the anger of the Chief of Staff when he
refused to accept a deal to free Jide Omokore, a businessman with ties
to former Petroleum Minister Diezani Alison-Madueke.
Our investigative correspondent learned that Mr. Omokore had made
efforts to see President Buhari twice with the assistance of the Chief
of Staff and offered bribes to Mr. Kyari and his team. Our investigator
also learned that Mr. Kyari had also promised Mr. Omokore that he would
be off the hook once he paid back a mere N500 million as restitution,
even though the businessman accumulated billions of dollars through
fraudulent oil swap deals and questionable acquisition of oil assets
arranged by former Petroleum Minister, Mrs. Alison-Madueke.
The EFCC’s Magu scuttled Mr. Kyari’s deal with the oil tycoon when he
not only arrested Mr. Omokore but also detained and arraigned him in
court for money laundering.
On his part, Attorney General Malami may have joined the conspiracy
to fire Mr. Magu from the EFCC because the AGF is close to interests
that see Mr. Magu as a threat. Also, a source close to the AGF told our
correspondent that Mr. Malami was upset that the EFCC boss was not
taking directives from him regarding issues of who to prosecute or not a
decision that made him set up a national protection commission
domiciled in his office. For instance, on several occasion when the EFCC
played a major role in the arraignment and prosecution of Senator
Saraki, the AGF and several members of his team, including the
Solicitor-General of the Federation and the Director of Public
Prosecution, had put enormous pressure on Rotimi Jacobs, the independent
prosecutor in charge of the case.
Soon after Mr. Magu’s appointment, the AGF had written a scathing
report addressed to President Buhari stating why he was completely
opposed to Mr. Magu’s confirmation as the substantive EFCC chairman.
Based on Mr. Malami’s prompting, Chief of Staff Kyari and the DSS
Director-General went to work to find dirt on Mr. Magu. It did not take
long before they found out that the National Security Adviser, Babagana
Monguno, was a strong backer of the EFCC chair. Mr. Kyari and his team
also discovered that both Mr. Monguno and Mr. Magu had been close
friends with a former Air Force officer and a member of the Presidential
Arms Investigation Panel, Air Commodore Umar Mohammed (rtd).
In June, DSS agents raided Commodore Mohammed’s home and detained him
on allegations that he received bribes from some suspects accused of
stealing funds budgeted for arms. SaharaReporters learned that, while in
DSS detention, Mr. Mohammed was pressured to implicate both Mr. Magu
and Mr. Monguno as persons for whom he was collecting bribes from former
Nigerian military officers under investigation. However, Mr. Mohammed
refused to budge. In retaliation, the DSS refused to release him despite
several court orders to do so. Justice Nnamdi Dimgba, one of the judges
who gave an order for Commodore Mohammed’s release, himself became a
victim of a late-night raid by the DSS two weeks as DSS agents began
hunting down judges accused of corruption.
When DSS agents could not get Commodore Mohammed to implicate Mr.
Monguno and Mr. Magu, they wrote a report claiming that the detained
former officer had been paying the rent for Mr. Magu’s home in Abuja.
They also alleged that Mr. Magu once flew to Kano on a private jet owned
by the detained air force general. When the DSS eventually charged
Commodore Mohammed to court, they made no mention of his being a front
for Mr. Monguno and Mr. Magu. Instead, he was accused of being in
possession of guns with an expired license and $1million allegedly found
at his home.
SaharaReporters learned that, as part of the internal conspiracy to
stall Mr. Magu’s confirmation, the Chief of Staff, Kyari, refused to
forward a letter to the Senate requesting for confirmation of the EFCC
boss. However, while President Buhari was in the United Kingdom in June
2016 for a short vacation and medical checkup, Vice President Yemi
Osinbajo invoked his powers as Acting President to compel the Chief of
Staff to send a letter to the Senate asking for Mr. Magu’s confirmation.
A reluctant Mr. Abba Kyari sent the letter. However, as soon as
President Buhari returned the Chief of Staff showed him “mountains of
security reports,” including some that claimed Mr. Magu was leaking
presidential secrets to Saharareporters and other news media. The source
also disclosed that Mr. Buhari wanted to know if Mr. Magu owned
expensive homes, huge bank accounts or had ever received proceeds of
corruption, to which the COS reportedly answered in affirmative.
A source at the Presidency told our correspondent that President
Buhari insisted that, since he ceded power to the VP, everything Mr.
Osinbajo did while was away could not be reversed.
According to one source, President Buhari did not want to use Mr.
Magu’s confirmation to bargain with Senator Saraki whom he loathes,
hence the president did nothing to lobby the Senate President to confirm
the EFCC chair even when Mr. Saraki met with him to ask for directives
on what to do with Magu.
Our investigation discovered that Mr. Saraki has been an active
player in the plot to stop Mr. Magu. The EFCC chair had offended the
senator twice during his political career. During the senator’s tenure
as Governor of Kwara State, Mr. Magu was in charge of the dreaded
“Governance Team” set up by the Nuhu Ribadu-led EFCC to go after corrupt
state governors between 2003 and 2009. Mr. Saraki was investigated and
was due for arrest when Mr. Ribadu was kicked out of the EFCC after he
managed to arrest former Governor James Ibori of Delta State. Mr. Saraki
then shopped for and recommended Farida Waziri as Mr. Ribadu’s
replacement. As soon as Mrs. Waziri was firmly planted as the
chairperson of the EFCC, she went after Mr. Magu, got him arrested and
detained on the flimsy excuse that EFCC documents were found on his
laptop in Lagos. Mr. Magu spent weeks in detention in 2008 and was
subsequently freed and redeployed to the Nigeria police.
Also, as soon as Mr. Magu was appointed to head the EFCC, he arrested
Mr. Saraki’s wife, Toyin Saraki, and interrogated her for hours. EFCC
officials said Mrs. Saraki wilted under the intense interrogation and
offered “very helpful information about her husband’s financial
misdeeds.”
SaharaReporters learned that Mr. Magu has made efforts on his own to
reach out to Senators to confirm him. However, our investigators learned
that some of the top senators demanded that he drop investigations
against them or hand over their files to them for destruction before
they would back his confirmation. Deputy Senate President Ike
Ekweremadu, whom Mr. Magu disgraced earlier this year after he was given
an award by the EFCC liaison to the National Assembly, reportedly tried
to extract apologies from Mr. Magu while secretly filming their
encounter. Also, Senator Stella Oduah, a former Aviation Minister, went
to meet Mr. Magu in his office in the company of a former Secretary to
the Federal Government, Pius Anyim, to pledge her support so long as Mr.
Magu was willing to drop investigations relating to her multimillion
dollar airport renovation projects during her ministerial tenure under
former President Goodluck Jonathan.
Also, former Governor Goodwill Akpabio of Akwa Ibom State reportedly
asked that Mr. Magu soft-pedals on a myriad of corruption cases against
him.
Two EFCC sources told SaharaReporters that Mr. Magu tactically
decided to slow down on prosecuting high-profile corruption cases in
order to advance his confirmation. However, his confirmation woes appear
even more complicated as several targets of EFCC investigations have
been pressuring Senators not to confirm him.
Mr. Saraki is coordinating onslaughts on Mr. Magu while regularly
telling lobbyists for the EFCC chairman that new conditions must be met
before he would move forward on the confirmation. According to one of
our sources, Mr. Saraki is demanding that some seasoned EFCC
investigators who handled his case be transferred out of the agency back
to the police. He had also required that Mr. Magu forward to him all
files relating to high- profile investigations of senators. Our source
said the Senate President appeared to want the documents to use them
either to control other senators or buy their loyalty.
One source said Attorney General Malami had already fulfilled the
first part of the agreement between him and Saraki. Last month, the
AGF’s office suddenly withdrew forgery charges against Mr. Saraki and
his deputy, Mr. Ekweremadu, claiming that prosecutors did not have a
watertight case against the two senators. At the next adjourned date,
charges were also dropped against two senior National Assembly staffers
who aided the forgery of National Assembly rules that led to the
controversial election of Mr. Saraki and Mr. Ekweremadu in 2015.
Our source stated that the next case to suffer would be the assets
declaration case against Senator Saraki at the Code of Conduct Tribunal.
According to the source, Rotimi Jacobs, the independent lawyer handling
the case, was being pressured to withdraw from it to enable more
malleable prosecutors to take over. The source said the strategy was to
prevail on the judge to conclude the trial without imposing any
significant sentence.
Mr. Saraki, who is currently in Geneva, is assuring those lobbying on
behalf of Mr. Magu he would get the EFCC chairman “confirmed” as soon
as the cabal at the Presidency sabotages all the anti-corruption cases
against him and Mr. Magu promises not to go after some persons of
interest to him.
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