The House of Representatives, its Committee on Public Petiton has issued warrant of the arrest on the Central Bank Governor, Mr Olayemi Cardoso, the Accountant General of the Federation, Mrs Oluwatoyin Madein and 17 others for refusing to appear before it to answer questions on their operations.
This followed the adoption of a motion by a member of the committee from Bayelsa state Fred Agbedi, at the committee’s hearing.
Moving the motion, Agbedi said that the arrest warrant had become inevitable following the attitude of the invitees.
He said that the parliament works with time and the CEOs had been invited four times, but failed to respond.
The Lawmaker added that the CEOs should be brought to appear before the committee by the Inspector General of Police through a warrant of arrest after due diligence by the Speaker, Rep. Tajudeen Abbas.
In his ruling, the Chairman of the committee Micheal Irom, said the IGP should ensure the CEOs were brought before the committee on December 14.
Earlier, the petitioner, Mr. Fidelis Uzowanem, explained that the petition was anchored on the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) report of 2021.
He said that the report was a summary of the transactions in the oil and gas industry for 2021 which NEITI could to be challenged.
“We took up the challenge to examine the report and discovered that what NEITI put together is a report is only consolidation of fraud that has been going on in the oil and gas industry.
It dates back to 2016 because was have been following and we put up a petition to this committee to examine what has happened.
“The 2024 budget of 27.5 trillion that has been proposed can be confidently be funded from the recoverable amount that we identified in the NEITI report.
It is basically a concealment of illegal transactions that took place in NNPCL, they have been in sink with some oil companies where some companies that did not produce crude were paid cash core, an amount paid for crude oil production,” he said.
He added that they also found that the cash core payment was use as a channel for laundering funds which NEITI was able to conceal it in its report.
Some of those to be arrested were the Chief Executive Officer, National Petroleum Investment Management Services (NAPIMS), that of Ethiop Eastern Exploration and Production Company Ltd, as well as the CEO of the Western Africa Exploration and Production.