FG: Looters hiding funds with sophistication

The Federal Government said the sophistication being used in hiding stolen funds is amazing.

Foreign Affairs Minister Geoffrey Onyeama stated this yesterday while addressing State House correspondents after the Federal Executive Council meeting.

Asked how much was stolen from Nigeria, Onyeama responded: “It’s an ongoing thing. We’ve 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 eve-dropping on some telephone conversations of members of the previous governments 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.”

The minister recalled that President Muhammadu Buhari had cooperated with former British Prime Minister David Cameron to organise a global conference on anticorruption.

He said Buhari had also made industrialized nations buy into looted funds’ recovery, noting that “For a very long period of time, it was not a priority for industrialized countries to worry about money flowing from developing countries into their banks because as far as they’re concerned, they’ve their own image of rulers of third world countries.”

Onyeama explained that Buhari addressed contemporary global issues at the just concluded 72nd session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York because “he was speaking to the international audience on a global stage and the UN is there for global issues.”