The House of Representatives, on Wednesday constituted a six-member panel to further investigate alleged disbursement of N1.47 billion loan to unspecified beneficiaries by the Nigeria Directorate of Employment (NDE).
The sub-committee was raised by the house’s Public Accounts Committee following consideration of a query by the Office of the Auditor-General of the Federation in 2011, requesting NDE to account for the disbursement of the funds.
The sub-committee is headed by Deputy Chairman of Public Accounts Committee, Rep. Ibrahim Baba, and has Reps. Legor Idagbor, Lawal Shuaibu, Sunday Adepoju, Olusegun Kehinde and Daniel Kolawole as members.
It was charged to investigate the loan disbursement and establish particulars of alleged beneficiaries.
The Office of the Auditor-General of the Federation had in the query expressed dissatisfaction that out of the N1.4 billion disbursed, only N289.9 million had been recovered, leaving outstanding of N1.18 billion.
It observed that the agency’s management had been unable to account for the whereabouts of the funds.
In response to a directive by the Public Accounts Committee on July 10, 2017, the Director-General of NDE, Mr Nasiru Mohammed, furnished it with a list of the beneficiaries and amount given to each of them.
Others items forwarded to the committee were copies of loan agreements and report of recoveries made from 1987 to 2010 and the copies of the audited accounts of the agency from 1997 to 2015.
Mohammed, however, told the lawmakers that the loan was disbursed by previous administrations of the agency.
Empanelling the committee, Chairman, Public Accounts Committee, Rep. Kingsley Chinda (Rivers-PDP), urged the NDE to cooperate with the sub-committee in carrying out the task.
Chinda said, “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 recently appointed to head the agency.’’ (NAN)