Senate Threatens to Involve EFCC in CBN N250bn Gas Intervention Funds Probe

The Senate Committee on Gas Resources probing the N250 billion Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) intervention funds to some firms in the oil and gas sector has threatened to involve the anti-graft agencies to y the money from defaulting beneficiaries.

The panel gave the threat when the affected companies, numbering 14, who hawd so far collected N135 billion out of the funds, appeared before it yesterday, to defend the utilisation of the loans they collected.

The members described as unacceptable, the fact that there was no synergy between the Ministry of Petroleum Resources and the CBN on the project.

They also queried the discriminatory disbursement of the funds to the beneficiaries and wondered why some firms collected more than the N10 billion credit limit.The Chairman of the Committee, Senator Agom Jarigbe, collected the records of the beneficiaries and the locations of their project sites for immediate investigations.

The committee would investigate all the observations and work on them and let Nigerians know the true position of things,” Jarigbe added.However, the Legal Adviser to one of the beneficiaries, Lee Engineering and Construction Company, Mathew Agbadon, complained to committee that the publication made by the committee had put the firm in a negative perspective.He said, “There has been a fundamental misconception out there in the public domain that some people just leverage on the CBN money, stole it and went away.”That is far from the truth. The truth of the he matter is that as a beneficiary of that scheme, we had business with the commercial bank.