We are after N3.3tr stolen pension fund- Maina

The Citizen

The Head of Presidential Task Force on Federal Pension Disbursement, Abdulrasheed Maina, has said that forensic audit has uncovered the sum of N3.3 trillion pension fund stolen by cabals in various government agencies.
Fielding questions from State House correspondents, Maina who refused to mention the agencies and individuals involved so as not to jeopardize ongoing investigation, said in the next couple of days the names would be made public having received the nod of the federal government to do so.
“I want to tell you that what we have uncovered will surprise Nigerians. We have found that pension fund up to N3.3 trillion was stolen by the cabal and we are going to recover all the money,” he said.
Maina who regretted that the hunter has become the hunted following what he termed “biased” probe by the Senate Joint Committee on Establishment and Public Service, wondered how a task force that recovered about N241 billion as at October this year and has deleted 73,000 ghost pensioners from the civil service list, is being bullied and blackmailed rather than being commended, assured this has only strengthen the committee’s resolve to do more.
According to him, “N74 billion of the N181 billion discovered and saved by the pension task team has so far been mopped up for utilization in the 2012 budget,” he said.
“The Task Team has established E-Pension Management System (E-Pms) Platform, pioneered the payment of pensioners in Diaspora, introduced smart cards to eliminate physical verification of pensioners, traced and cracked down on pension cartel, simplify the processing period of getting pension entitlements down to 24 hours, discovered a total of 50,000 unpaid pensioners and paid them all their entitlements, stopped monthly stealing of N.25 billion from the Head of Service of the Federation Pension Office, cutting off N1 billion Police pension monthly release of N1.59 billion to N500 million instead and caused th arrest and prosecution of pension suspects.
“The team has also converted over 128,000 hard copies of pensioner’s file into electronic format, seized properties worth billions and cut off the pensioners verification annual expenditure of over N40 billion.
He said “the Senate Joint Committee on Establishment and Public Service is unfair to us because they have taken sides with the cabal against those of us that are fighting the corruption in the system.
“That is why I wrote a protest letter to the Senate President to complain how the committee is biased. They don’t allow us to answer questions because they will insist on a yes or no answer and that is unfair.”
Maina denied knowledge of the alleged theft of N195 billion by the pension office saying “we have been doing all this work without running cost and we don’t even have money to buy some basic office items like printing paper and toner. The records are there for all to see”.
He added, ” the Pension Task Team does not control or approve the utilization of the finances of the aforementioned pension offices (Military, Police, DSS, CIPPO and the Head of Service Pension Offices from 2005-2010), and for this reason, it could not have been possible for anybody to hold the team accountable for an allegedly missing funds by other pension offices to which the team has no control over.