The Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Mr Ola Olukoyede, says in less than 100 days of his assumption of office, the anti-graft agency received over 5,000 fraud petitions and recovered N60bn loot.

Of the 5,000 petitions, he said the EFCC had approved 3,000 for investigation.

President Bola Tinubu appointed Olukoyede EFCC chairman on October 12, 2023.

He replaced Abdurasheed Bawa, an appointee of ex-President Muhammadu Buhari, who was suspended, detained, and booted out of office by Tinubu.

Olukoyede, speaking on Saturday in Lagos as the guest lecturer at the 20th-anniversary lecture of the Human and Environmental Development Agenda Resources Centre,  said the EFCC had recovered over N60bn and $10m, in less than four months since he assumed office.

He said, “When we set out to investigate, people see it as a fight between EFCC and the rest of us. It should not be so. How much will the EFCC do?

“How much will the ICPC do with its staff strength? I have less than 4,800 staff. I am talking of an agency that is serving people who are over 150 million.

 
“All we have to do is investigate and present the facts before the court. I will not be the one to give judgment. That is where we have collective responsibility. When you see something, you say something
“The issue is we are working as if we are not working. Upon my assumption of office between then and now, I have received over 5,000 petitions. I am not talking of just the one we received, but the one that we have checked and we discovered that there was substance in it. That is just for one agency, the EFCC.

 “As I am talking to you I have approved the investigation of over 3,000 cases in less than four months, but what is our capacity? How many staff do we have? What resources do I have access to?

“In less than four months, we secured convictions of 700 and recovered over N60bn and over $10m.

“If I am able to recover over N60bn in less than 100 days, you can imagine how much has been stolen.

“I can tell you that for the billion that has been recovered, a trillion has been stolen.”

On his part, the Chairman of HEDA, Mr. Olanrewaju Suraju, noted that the anti-corruption fight had been challenging and urged all Nigerians to join the fight.

 

“We need an effective policing system with integrity, then the court must not continue to discharge persons with corruption cases still hanging on their necks,” Suraju said.

[Punch]