Don't Miss

Senate Accuses EFCC of Inflating Their 2013 Budget

By David Abellegah on November 23, 2012

EFCC Chairman, Ibrahim Lamorde

The Senate Committee on Drugs, Narcotics, and Anticorruption on Thursday described the expenses of the Economic and financial Crimes Commission as “outrageous.”

Senators frowned at the huge allocations for travels and trainings while considering the agency’s 2013 budget proposals. The committee asked the EFCC Chairman, Ibrahim Lamorde to provide justification for the budget.

“You are an agency fighting corruption and you must ensure transparency. We need to have all the evidence that you paid for these items,” Chairman of the committee, Senator Victor Lar, told the EFCC boss.

The committee frowned at the several expenses, like the N100m for international travels, N73m for local training and another N130m for international training and another N357m for local travels and transportation.

They also said EFCC spent N54m for sporting activities and frowned at the payment of N135m for satellite and broadband charges, which, the Senators said, was not good enough.

In his response, Lamorde said that the amount allocated for travels was justifiable in that it was meant to cater for transport and operational expenses of investigators.

He said, “A lot of funding is required for travelling to the different locations where investigations are to be carried out. You cannot predict the actual amount of money that would be required because an investigator may go to a location and would spend a week in order to be able to do a thorough job.

“The team of investigators may compromise two or three detectives with another set of officers who would serve as protection and they have to be paid their DTAs and other allowances.

“We have to ensure that they are properly accommodated so that they are not exposed to compromises.”

The EFCC boss said the commission would make available the payment receipts for the amount to corroborate his claims.

Lamorde told the Senate committee that the EFCC had been unable to accomplish key convictions for the reason that suspects who were in “control of huge wealth,” thereby manipulate the process.

The committee asked Lamorde to explain why some public figures standing trial could not be convicted thus raising fears that the EFCC had been bungling its court cases.

Lamorde said, “The truth is, no case has been concluded. I don’t think it is correct to say that whether the charges framed are not properly done or the prosecutors are not putting the cases properly. What we have is that the trials are on going.

“We have example of a case we charged to court in 2006; for this very case, we have gone to the Supreme Court twice on just interlocutory applications. They will file this, the judge will overrule them, they will go to Court of Appeal and lose there but they will still go to the Supreme Court. At the Supreme Court when they lose, they will be asked to go to the trial judge for the case to continue.

“They will come with another application and certainly for lawyers among us we know how long it takes for a trial to go to Court of Appeal and get listed, then go to the Supreme Court get it listed and decided upon. This is the fate of most of the cases we have in court.”

For the moment, the commission has said it wants to drop the use of external solicitors for the prosecution of its cases in court to cut down cost.

“We are planning to stop giving cases to external solicitors. We are trying to develop the capacity of the EFCC lawyers, using the assistance of international cooperation. Because even the convictions we have made were made possible through the efforts of the internal lawyers,” he said.

Lamorde said they had a short fall of N710.230m since the requested for N6.514b for personnel expenditure, but had N5.804b allocated to it by the Budget Office.

“Due to this shortfall, the commission would not be able to meet its personnel cost fully in 2013,” he said.

featured