More than 3,000 financial crimes will be investigated by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.
According to The PUNCH, this was revealed by the chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Mr. Ola Olukoyede.
He explained that the 3,000 cases approved for investigation were part of the over 5,000 petitions received by the agency from different groups and Nigerians.
Olukoyede said this at the 20th-anniversary lecture of the Human and Environmental Development Agenda Resources Centre, held in Lagos on Saturday.
He added, “When we set out to investigate. People see it as a fight between EFCC and the rest of us. It should not be so. How much will the EFCC do?
“How much will ICPC do with its staff strength? I have less than 4,800 staff. I am talking of an agency that is serving people who are over 150 million.
“All we have to do is investigate and present the facts before the court. I will not be the one to give judgement. That is where we have collective responsibility. When you see something, you say something.
“The issue is we are working as if we are not working. Upon my assumption of office between then and now, I have received over 5,000 petitions. I am not talking of just the one we received, but the one that we have checked and discovered that there was substance in it. That is just for one agency, EFCC.
“As I am talking to you I have approved the investigation of over 3,000 cases in less than four months, but what is our capacity, how many staff do we have? What resources do I have access to?
“In less than four months, we secured convictions of 700 and recovered over 60 billion naira, over 10 million dollars.
“If I am able to recover over 60 billion naira in less than 100 days, you can imagine how much has been stolen.
“I can tell you that for the billion that has been recovered, trillion has been stolen.”
