President Muhammadu Buhari has
ordered the sack of a Permanent Secretary, who has been allegedly using his
office to defraud the Federal Government through the award of phantom contracts
worth billions of Naira to himself.
The permanent secretary, was
appointed by Buhari in 2015, was fired, Tuesday, on the orders of the
President. A source in the ministry confirmed that two police officers drove
the sacked permanent secretary from the Federal Secretariat, Abuja, raising
concerns as to what might have led to such an action.
A Presidency source confirmed it
said that the President ordered the immediate removal of the top civil servant,
who presided over the affairs of one of the strategic ministries handling
intervention programmes in the country following evidence that he awarded
contracts to companies belonging to him.
It was that the sacked permanent
secretary had deployed several strategies to evade a sting operation, which had
been planned by one of the anti-graft agencies, thereby making it impossible
for the operatives to track him down.
It was learned that key officials of
the ministry, who got wind of the illicit activities of the permanent
secretary, drew the attention of security agencies to the development and
called for urgent investigation of the man.
One of the security agency
officials, who handled the investigation of the sacked permanent secretary,
told our correspondent that the sting operation planned against the official
was frustrated by him and his agents, forcing them to delay his arrest since
January this year.
“We have been monitoring the man and
the various companies being used by him to siphon huge sums of money from the
ministry, which handles intervention programmes in the Niger Delta region but
he has been very smart and suspicious of our movement, thereby making it
impossible for us to arrest him despite the ambush we laid for him and his
cronies,” one of the operatives said last night.
He said: “But Mr. President did not
waste time in asking the Head of Service of the Federation to sack the man with
immediate effect as soon as he got to know that the man had used over 500
companies to award fake contracts to himself and move huge sums of money from
the ministry in question.”
“In fact, the discovery of the large
scale fraud in the ministry, which has suffered a lot of project failure and
the subsequent sacking of the permanent secretary by Mr. President, followed
painstaking investigation by the anti-corruption agencies, which will soon
charge the man to court,” the source added.
Source:Vanguard
Tags
Politics