The committee has been accused by the National Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) of receiving a N31 million bribe from it. Chairman of the House Committee on Public Accounts yesterday resolved to commence full investigation into the allegation by the NERC for capacity training of its members with no evidence that the training ever took place.
The amount, it was learnt, was supposedly paid to the Power Committee in two installments of N18 million and N13 million respectively. The House resolved to investigate the allegation after the NERC Chairman, Sam Amadi, with top officials of the Commission appeared before it over the financial queries raised against it by the Office of the Auditor-General of the Federation which covered between 2009 and 2010 respectively.
The Auditor-General’s query revealed that the amount was collected by an aide to the chairman of the committee for the members to attend a capacity-training workshop in overseas, but with no evidence that the members attended the workshop and the money was not returned to the Commission in line with financial regulations.
In a related development, the Commission was also accused of paying $5,000 to a foreign resource person through the black market despite the readiness of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, to carry out the transaction on behalf of the Commission, but demanded relevant documents that would facilitate the transaction.
According to the AGF, rather than to return to the CBN with the request documents, the Commission took the amount from the CBN and gave it to a staff who went to the black market to carry out the transaction.
The Commission was also said to have bought a 100kv generator at the cost of N6 million for the Secretariat of the Presidential Task Force on Electricity Reform which market value was put at between N1.5 million and N2.5 million without following due process.
At the hearing session, Amadi admitted that the transaction and other ones as contained in the Auditor-General’s query actually took place, but were done before his assumption of office and as such he would only rely on available information from the staff for defence, the submission which the committee declared as unacceptable, insisting that the Commission must account for every kobo involved.
Consequently, the committee resolved that the Chairman of the Commission must appear before it on November 11 this year with his predecessor and all the former commissioners that were in office when the transactions took place.
The committee directed Amadi to come with the name of the aide to the then Chairman of House Committee on Power who collected the money, the names of the members of the committee who benefited from the money, the amount collected each, the relevant documents on mode of payment of the money to the aide, whether by cheque or cash.
The Commission is also to furnish the committee with the name of the staff that collected the $5,000 and all documents related to the transaction and other relevant documents on the N6 million generating set Chairman of the House Committee on Public Accounts, Hon Solomon Adeola Olamilekan, said the committee was worried that a whopping sum of N31 million could be paid to an aide of a Chairman of the Committee and not the Chairman and members directly for the purported capacity training if the transaction actually took place.
Source: National Mirror
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