$49.8b missing oil fund: Senate did not absolve Alison-Madueke, NNPC – Saraki

There appears to be a crack in the Senate Committee on Finance, which probed the allegation of missing $49.8 billion oil fund.
The crack appeared late on Wednesday when a member of the Committee and former Governor of Kwara State, Dr. Abubakar Bukola Saraki, said the Committee was yet to absolve the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Deziani Alison-Madueke, and the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation of guilt in the matter.
The position of Saraki runs contrary to the report submitted by Senator Ahmed Makarfi, the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, which probed the allegation of the missing fund levelled by the suspended Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi.
The Committee in the report submitted to plenary on Wednesday, said it could not trace any missing fund.
It rather blamed Sanusi for giving contradicting figures of the amount missing.
But Saraki, in a short statement on Wednesday night, said the Committee cannot come to a final conclusion on the matter until the forensic audit of the missing funds had been completed, warning the media against writing spurious reports on the issue.
The statement reads: “The recent media reports claiming that the Senate Committee on Finance has cleared NNPC of any unaccounted revenue fund is not true. Though I could not attend the last meeting of the committee, I have been very active in the investigation. Nothing significant has changed to suggest clearing anybody. I can say on behalf of the Committee that these media reports bear no correlation to the content of the Senate Committee report and I would urge the public to disregard it in its entirety.
“The Committee is yet to receive the report on the forensic audit and independent analysis on the subject clearly indicate we have a lot of grounds to cover in order to determine the level of culpability or otherwise of agency on the alleged non-committal, so to suggest any clearance for anybody at this stage is out of the question.
“I will further advise that the media should wait for the senate to release the details of the Committee report to the public before they jump into spurious conclusions.”