By Harry Awurumibe, State House, Abuja
The Federal Government has approved the appointment of a Lead Consultant for the much-awaited Forensic Audit of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) which had delayed the constitution of the board of the Commission.
Also, the sum of N310 million has been approved for the consultants, Messers Olumuyiwa, Bashiru & Co. to execute the job which includes the appointments of 9 other forensic auditors to join in the probing of NDDC.
Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, Senator Godswill Akpabio disclosed this today after the weekly Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting.
According to him, “the Ministry today presented a memo to FEC to appoint a Lead Consultant for the Forensic Audit of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) and of course that Lead Consultant will now appoint and coordinate the appointments of the other forensic auditors that will take part in the exercise.
The amount is about N318 million and Messers Olumuyiwa and Bashir & Co. who were appointed as the Lead Consultants will now work with the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs and NDDC.
They were today approved by DEC as the Lead Consultants who will, in turn, bring other forensic auditors that will handle the audit of NDDC as ordered by Mr. President after the request by the 9 Governors of the Niger Delta region. The 9 Governors who met with Mr. President on October 2019 and requested for the Forensic Audit of the NDDC. And off course as the result of the fact that the region has not had value for the huge amount of money expended in that Commission since its inception.
And so the Forensic Audit will cover from 2001 all the way down to later part of 2019. And we are going to have other forensic auditors joining the Lead and we are treating each of the States and there are quite a lot. We are going to have a Consortium or Consortia of 9 Forensic Auditors and one of which will be in the Head Office to handle programmes and personnel and others. It must have international flavour in case their monies that are denominated in dollars to be recovered at that Forensic Exercise so Merssers Olumuyiwa, Bashiru & Co. were today approved by DEC as a Lead Consultants or Coordinators to bring in other 9 Forensic Auditors for exercise to kick off.
The estimated period given by Bureau of Public Procurement to conclude the exercise is about 9 months
