A proposed amendment to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) Act 2006 will empower the commission to investigate and prosecute persons living beyond their incomes.
This is one of the issues to be discussed at the meeting of the commission and the Senate Committee on Drugs, Narcotics, Anti-Corruption and Financial Crimes rescheduled for Wednesday.
EFCC Chairman Farida Waziri and her team are expected to discuss with the committee how they want the amendment fine-tuned and incorporated in the bill that will be presented to the National Assembly soon.
Chairman of the Senate Committee on Drugs, Narcotics, Anti-Corruption and Financial Crimes, Senator Sola Akinyede, said yesterday that Waziri and her team had been asked to meet with the committee on Wednesday for “a robust interactive session” on EFCC 2007 audited report, which was submitted to the committee.
He stated that the proposed amendment is contained in the report, pointing out that “similar provision is in the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) Act, only that the ICPC is not using its powers to the fullest. But the EFCC, in the report, did not specify how it wanted the amendment specified.”
According to him, “We have asked her to come with her team on Wednesday at 2 p.m. for a robust interactive session. We invited the ICPC leadership and we had an interactive session that lasted over three hours.”
Wednesday’s meeting is a follow-up to last week’s meeting at which Waziri told the Senate committee that she was not informed in the letter of invitation that she was coming to answer questions on the audited report.
She had used the occasion to raise the alarm that her detractors were still working to undercut her in her task of exposing corruption and its perpetrators in the country.
She had clarified media reports that credited her to have said that case files of some former executive office holders were missing and that there was no case against some of them.
Waziri had declared at the meeting that she was working on the facts of the cases she met on ground in the commission and could therefore not manufacture evidence against former office executive office holders, including former President Olusegun Obasanjo and 31 ex-governors said to have been investigated by her predecessor, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu.
“I know that my detractors are still working to throw brickbats at me left, right and centre. That is why I have been very careful in talking to the press and that went on and I can’t tell you the stories that are emanating from this one similar statement even though I tried to make the correction, it is still there. It is so much that I am shielding Obasanjo; that I am shielding governors; that I went there to protect governors.”
But she had said: “As far as I know, I am doing what I can do on the facts of the cases I met on the ground. I cannot just manufacture evidence. This is a case of ‘prove beyond all reasonable doubt’.”
Oct202008