Ndubuisi Orji, Abuja

The House of Representatives has said that the court cannot stop the legislature from investigating or exposing corruption in the country.

The chairman, House of Representatives Committee on Finance, James Faleke, stated this in Abuja, on Monday , while speaking at an investigative hearing organised by the House joint committee on Finance and Banking and Currency, on the alleged $30billion annual revenue leakages.

Faleke, who was reacting to a suit filed by a customer of the Stanbic IBTC bank, seeking to prevent the bank from making any disclosure to the joint conmittee, said the legislature will not be deterred in the performance of its constitutional duties.

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According to him, “they (IBTC) went to Court using one of their customers, who is of course their lawyer.Somebody went to court to challenge the powers of the National Assembly, in a democracy, you should expect that and the courts are there to determine. The laws are very clear, section 88, 89 is very clear that we can invite anybody under the sun to testify.

“Of course on paper, we saw that it is one Chief Taiwo SAN, that sued on behalf of other customers. I don’t know whether that is normal doing a class action. We are also aware that Chief Taiwo is the lawyer because in all the audited reports of the bank that we have seen, he has always been the one signing off.

“So we know he is the lawyer of the bank and I say not clearly, that by the time we finish the investigation, IBTC will tell Niherians what they want to hide why they went to Court because we will tell Nigerians what we know and what is in our papers. We are only asking IBTC to submit documents to clarify so that we can give fair hearing and not seen to be judgemental even before asking them.”

However, the lawmaker noted that there are records to show that the country is losing over $30 billion every year, to alleged malpractices, tax evasion amongst others, hence the motion that necessitated the probe.