Three bank accounts belonging to the Lagos State Government have been frozen by a Federal High Court sitting in Lagos over an alleged fraud of N9.9bn.
The affected accounts are said to be domiciled in Access Bank, First City Monument Bank and Zenith Bank with numbers respectively as 0060949275, 5617984012 and 1011691254.
Following an ex parte application by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Justice Chuka Obiozor ordered the “suspension” of the bank accounts.
The anti-graft agency had urged the Federal High Court to freeze the accounts until the conclusion of the investigation and possible prosecution of the Permanent Secretary in the Office of the Chief of Staff to the Governor of Lagos State, Adewale Adesanya, for money laundering.
In a court document tendered with the ex parte application, an official of the EFCC, Kungmi Daniel, said the commission discovered “a huge inflow of N9,927,714,443.29” from the state accounts into an FCMB bank account opened on September 17, 2018 during the administration of former governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, and operated by Adesanya.
Daniel said the schedule of the FCMB account showed how Adesanya and the other signatories to the account made fraudulent transfers from the accounts of the Lagos State Government.
He said, “The trend in the account is that the account always witnessed huge inflow from Lagos State Government in the above-scheduled accounts managed by the respondent (Adesanya).
“There have been concerted efforts and attempts to dissipate the contents of the accounts listed in the schedule to this application.
“Without freezing the nominated accounts and temporarily forfeiting the money to the Government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, there is no way the fraud being perpetrated using the scheduled accounts can be stopped.”
According to a report by The PUNCH, Justice Obiozor ordered the freezing of the accounts after listening to the arguments of EFCC lawyer, Mohammed Abbas.
The matter was adjourned till August 9, 2019 for further deliberation.
No comments:
Post a Comment