By Baron Ike
Foreign Affairs minister,Geoffrey Onyeama, has said the government was making frantic efforts to recover stolen funds stashed away outside the country.
He spoke to newsmen in Abuja on Wednesday, September 27 even as he was not sure of the amount of money stole from the government coffers by those who worked in the previous administration led by the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP) superintended by President Goodluck Jonathan.
But one Onyeama was sure of is that the United States was monitoring the telephone conversations of members of the Jonathan administration on some “suspicious” investments made in the country, particularly that involving the former Petroleum Minister, Diezani Alison-Madueke.
An indicting telephone conversation between Diezani, and her associates – Kola Aluko and Jide Omokore – was leaked in July this year.
Diezani was heard chiding Aluko for being too extravagant and ostentatious, and attracting attention and scrutiny to himself.
The U.S. government had seized some pieces of property linked to Alison-Madueke and her associates in the country.
Onyeama however told reporters that the government was making effort to recover stolen funds stashed away abroad.
On how much has so far been stolen from the country, he said: “On the issue of how much is stolen from the country, it’s an ongoing thing, we have been discovering all the time because you see the sophistication that there is today in hiding money around the world is amazing, even western countries themselves have a lot of problems and it takes them a lot of time and they discovered about the Panama papers, nobody knew about all those funds illegally stashed until you suddenly have the revelations under the Panama papers. So it’s really an ongoing thing and then new ones coming up all the time.
“As you saw recently we never knew about the US eavesdropping on some telephone conversations of members of the previous government and private sectors talking about investments that were made in the United States, it just suddenly came out like that, so it’s an ongoing thing.”