Minister of Labour and Productivity, Emeka Wogu’s woes are multiplying by the day as an anti-graft group, Anti-Corruption Network, on Monday, in Abuja urged President Goodluck Jonathan to immediately sack him as Minister to save the nation from further embarrassment.
The group also urged the President to remove Wogu as Chairman of the committee given the mandate to prepare a white paper based on the report of the Nuhu Ribadu-led Petroleum Revenue Special Taskforce.
This stance, according to the group’s executive secretary and former member of the House of Representatives, Mr. Dino Melaye, is premised on its independent findings which effectively linked the Minister to a firm, Pinnacle Contractors Limited, which the committee said pocketed N2.7 billion without importing “one cup of fuel.”
According to Melaye, their investigations have also revealed that the Minister has financial interest in or at worst has benefited from the N2.7 billion subsidy payments made to Pinnacle Contractors in 2011 at a time when his wife and son, Oyababefe and Enyinnaya, were directors of the company.
Speaking to journalists on the development, Melaye, who is now a member of the opposition Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), insisted that although Wogu no longer holds an executive position in the firm after its July 20, 2012 re-organization, he stated that doing business with a company in which a serving minister’s family has financial interests amounts to fraud and conflict of interest.
Melaye also disclosed that the Anti-Corruption Network has already instituted legal proceedings against the Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo Iweala over the payments she authorized to be made to the company maintaining that she deserves to be sacked by President Jonathan claiming that those payments amounted to fraud perpetrated against the federal government.
“It is shameful and disgraceful that the Minister of Labor and Productivity, Chief Emeka Wogu has been indicted in the illegal payment of N2.7 billion to a company for fuel that was never supplied. He cannot be a judge in his own case. Now, how do we perceive the man whose decision in January inflicted pain and torture on Nigerians during the fuel subsidy protests…? he said.
Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) registration documents for Pinnacle Contractors Limited with registration no: RC419968 seen by THEWILL showed the Minister as a director with controlling shares until April 2010 when he stepped down from the company.
