House of Representatives Public Accounts Committee on Wednesday in Abuja set up a six-man panel to investigate alleged disbursement of N1.47 billion loan to unspecified beneficiaries by National Directorate of Employment (NDE).
The resolution followed the consideration of a query raised by the Office of the Auditor General of the Federation in 2011.
The auditor general requested the NDE to give account of how the N1.47 billion was disbursed to some Nigerians under its skills acquisition scheme since its inception.
The Sub-Committee, headed by the Committee Deputy Chairman, Rep. Ibrahim Baba, also has Reps. Legor Idagbor, Lawal Shuaibu, Sunday Adepoju, Olusegun Kehinde and Daniel Kolawole as members.
The committee is to investigate the loan disbursement and establish particulars of alleged beneficiaries.
The Office of Auditor-General of the Federation had in the query expressed dissatisfaction that out of the N1.47 billion disbursed, only N289.9 million had been recovered so far.
According to the Office of Auditor General, there is an outstanding of N1.18 billion and the agency’s leadership cannot account for the whereabouts of the balance.
Responding to a directive issued by the Public Accounts Committee on July 10, 2017, NDE Director-General, Mr Nasiru Mohammed, furnished it with list of the beneficiaries and amount granted to each of them.
Others are copies of loan agreement and report of recoveries made from 1987 to 2010 and the copies of the audited accounts of the agency from 1997 to 2015.
Mohammed told the lawmakers that the loans were disbursed by previous administrations of the agency.
While setting up the panel, Chairman, Public Accounts Committee, Rep. Kingsley Chinda (Rivers-PDP), urged the NDE to cooperate with the sub-committee in carrying out the task.
“Considering the fact that we will want to do a detailed work on the NDE query, we, therefore ask the members to consider the query for NDE in 2011 Paragraph 9.14 A to H”.
The aforementioned portions directly deal with misgivings and the need for explanatory notes accompanying the responses provided by the Director General, who said he was just appointed to head the agency. (NAN)
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