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 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 learnt 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 also learnt 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 told Vanguard 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.
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