Senate Orders Arrest of Police Pension Fund Boss

After months of investigating the mismanagement of the Police Pension Fund, the Senate yesterday began the consideration of the report of its committee, and upheld the prosecution of Abdulrasheed Maina, chairman of the Pension Task Force, as recommended.

Senate president ,David Mark, was so angry with the revelations in the report, that he ordered that Maina be made to appear on July 3 to answer questions on Customs, Immigration and the Prisons Pension office.

Mark threatened that if Maina and his officials failed to appear, he would personally sign the warrant of his arrest saying “Maina and others involved in the pension scam should be arrested and prosecuted by the police, for crimes of fraud, embezzlement, illegal virement and misappropriation of pension fund.

“The Task Team should be immediately disbanded, as its continued existence and usurpation of statutory functions and violation of extant laws is illegal, as also recommended by the two former and current Heads of Service and Accountant General of the Federation”.

The report of the committee listed the alleged offences by Maina as “illegal contract splitting and award to the tune of N1.8 billion; spending N1.6 billion as running cost of police pension, instead of N80 million appropriated.

“Spending N830.8 million for payment of June 2010 pension using cheques instead of e-payment system; dubious enrolment of pensioners into payroll, 49,395; spending N234 million on already 90 per cent completed biometrics capturing with no files.

“Spending N17 million on biometric verification of less than 30 pensioners in Diaspora, without recourse to Nigerian Embassy in the country.

In the document before the Senate, the committee recommended that “the outstanding pension fund balances of N273,941,568,915 in all the pension offices of the Federal Government be mopped up by the Accountant-General of the Federation and be used to settle all outstanding pension entitlements”.

The Senate, before it adjourned sitting yesterday, approved 104 recommendations of the report and rejected 22 while the final conclusion of the report would have to wait till when Maina appears before it next month.

All the recommendations were highlighted in a series of stories published by BusinessDay spanning March to June, this year, on the alleged fraudulent activities of the Maina –led Pension task force .

In an earlier screening by the renowned audit firm, KPMG, it was discovered that the task force , allegedly exceeded its payment mandate by authorising a total of N396.23 million in irregular payments from an account that had a specific purpose other than that.

The second was how Maina allegedly escalated the running cost for the Police Pension Office (PPO) to N480 million in two months, N400 million more than the N80 million appropriated in the 2011 budget from an account in a first generation bank.

A breakdown of the payments described as irregular by KPMG, include N177.23 million expended on duty tour allowance and estacode on the offshore biometric capturing exercise within the country and another N34.6 million.

Only N140 million of the N177.23 million spent on biometric data exercise in the Diaspora was captured by the KPMG team and featured in its report to Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy.

Other expenditures of N184.4 million and N34.6 million, said to have been spent on biometric data capturing exercise within the country were hidden from the KPMG team and as such, were not reflected in its report.

Findings on the N34.6 million revealed that the actual expenditure was N17.3 million but was duplicated, with two supporting documents to bring it to N34.6 million. Also, while one set of documents said the N17.3 million payments was for the entire exercise in the 36 states of the federation the other said it was for the exercise only in the North East zone.

Furthermore, the covering memo for the two sets of documents said the payment was for members of the task team but observation of the attached names showed that one Ayoka S was the only member of the team that featured on the two documents which contained a total of 26 names.