Accusations and counter-accusations continue to trail investigation into pension fund management and administration in Nigeria as the Managing Director of GT Bank, Mr. Segun Agbaje, on Tuesday blew the lid over some accounts used to siphon N3 billion.
Former Head of Service of the Federation, Oladapo Afolabi, dismissed claims by the Chairman of the Pension Reform Task Team, Mr. AbdulRasheed Maina, that his team had recovered £6 million on behalf of the Federal Government, which was kept with Crown Merchant Bank in the United Kingdom.
Afolabi said during his tenure, no such money was lost and so, no money could have been recovered as claimed by Maina.
Three of the four suspected bank accounts used for the transfer of N3 billion pension fund without authorisation from the office of the Accountant General of the Federation were confirmed by Agbaje at the resumed public hearing on pension fund administration by the Joint Committee on Establishment and Public Service and States and Local Government Administration.
In response to questions from the Chairman of the committee, Senator Aloysius Etok, and co-Chairman, Senator Kabiru Gaya, Agbaje said it was possible to deposit fund on placement in the name of a person without opening an account.
One of the accounts names, Adedokun Oludare Ebenezer, according to Gaya, shared the same account name with Afolabi.
But while Agbaje confirmed the account name of Adedokun, whom he said was not a pensioner, he, however, said he would have to go back to the bank account record to confirm if Afolabi was one of their customers.
The GT Bank boss said that was because he only came with the list of the four persons, whose details of accounts were requested for by the committee.
He was then asked if the committee should take his response to mean that Afolabi did not have account with the bank, but he insisted that he still needed to check the bank records to provide an adequate answer to the question.
Three other account names: Ugwu Eveline with account number 0046339372, Gadaya Mustafa and Yakubu Fatima were confirmed by Agbaje, who also denied knowledge of another account holder, Bankole Francis Tunde.
Again, when Agbaje was asked about the two separate lodgments of N1.5 million each, which was credited to the account of Adedokun to make up the N3 million in it, Agbaje confirmed the first N1.5 million but said the other lodgments were done in batches of N500,000, N700,000 and N300,000.
In a breakdown of the history of the account, Agbaje said the highest single withdrawal was about N750,000.
He also said N2 billion was transferred from the pension fund account to Eco Bank on the instruction of the pension office, leaving N1.1 billion.
The account, according to Agbaje, has so far generated an interest of N924,000.
Meanwhile, the committee reiterated that it will not receive any document send to it in a soft copy and advised those appearing before the committee to present only hard copies of their presentations.
This decision was made known over Maina’s inability to present a Ghana-must-go bag of documents he had earlier promised to buttress his defence.
Maina reportedly shocked the Senate probe panel with “an empty ipad computer” where he was said to have saved all the documents requested by the committee.
This is even as Afolabi dismissed claims by the PRTT boss that they have recovered £6 million in Crown Merchant Bank of UK.
In his address before the committee, Afolabi insisted that “it is a false claim that anything was recovered.
“Nothing was lost, nothing was recovered. All I know is that throughout my stay in office no money was lost,” Afolabi said.
Also, a Permanent Secretary in the office of the Head of Service of the Federation, Mr. Richards Bonadu, told the committee the contentious £6 million is an investment fund with the Crown Merchant Bank opened in 1990, and that it was not a secret or private account.
Rounding off the first day of the resumed public hearing, Etok insisted the committee would not accept any form of computer soft copy from any individual or corporate organisation as the “iPad” tendered by Maina was blank.