Juliana Taiwo-Obalonye, New York.
Barely 24 hours after President Muhammadu Buhari told Process and Industrial Development (P&ID), the Irish engineering firm that recently won a $9.6 billion judgment against Nigeria, that it would not succeed in swimdling the country out of that money, the acting chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ibrahim Magu, has described P&ID as a fraudulent firm that should not be negotiated with.
This is coming even as a British court Thursday said Nigeria could appeal against the enforcement of the judgment granting P&ID the fiat to seize Nigerian assets worth $9.6 billion.
Magu stated this at a high-level National Side-Event “Promotion of International Cooperation to Combat Illicit Financial Flows and Sstrengthen Good Practices On Asset Recovery and Return to Foster Sustainable Development”, organised by the African Union Development Agency and New Partnership for Africa’s Development (AUDA-NEPAD) and the EFCC on the margins of the 74th United Nations General Assembly in New York.
“The source of illicit financial flow (IFF) is hydra-headed, with dirty tentacles such as illegal mining, kidnapping, terrorism, militancy, smuggling, crude oil theft and other forms of organised crimes, attendant effect of non-sustainable development in the country.
“In fact, the recent one is international conspiracy to defraud Nigeria of over $9.6 billion, which is about one-third of our budget and that constitutes about one-fourth of our national reserve, by people who are completely fraudulent. Complete. There is no legality whatsoever, so we should not even negotiate with them,” he said.