CCB quizzes OSOPADEC leadership over N400m fraud

The Code of Conduct Bureau, on Wednesday, quizzed the leadership of the Ondo State Oil Producing Area Development Commission over the alleged misappropriation of funds belonging to the commission

Those invited by the CCB included the Secretary of the commission, Mrs Abike Bayo-Ilawole and two other directors of the commission

Bayo-Ilawole, who was among the few public servants promoted to the position of Permanent Secretary in the state, was alleged to have been involved in a N400million allegedly misappropriated in the commission a few weeks ago.

It was gathered that Bayo-Ilawole allegedly diverted the money to a private bank account reportedly linked to her biological father.

Speaking after being questioned by the officials of the CCB at the Akure, Ondo State office, on Wednesday, Bayo-Ilawole said she was invited by the bureau over the allegations of fund misappropriation, but claimed to be innocent of the allegation.

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She said, “I’m being invited by the Code of Conduct on an alleged fund attempt to be misappropriated, so I’m being invited to be investigated, and we just started. The allegation has been misappropriation of funds. They gave some numbers. I think when I saw, maybe N463 million misappropriation, yes. To me, I just felt the record would speak for itself, and that has been my response. I told them nothing of such happened, and the record will speak for itself.”

On the allegations of diversion of money to a personal account, Bayo-Ilawole said, ” I said the record will speak for itself. It is not true, like the one they quoted, that money was sent to my father’s account; it was a long-term project. My father was a contractor then and was never up to that term, but the record will speak for itself, as I said.

“Then the two officers’ names were captured, one or two things that I know about it were that they supervised other colleagues. It could be their allowances, it could be the allowance of officers or what they needed to spend on the project. So, they should allow me to go through the record, and we will separate this, and we will know what actually transpired. But one of the major things that is obvious is that this fund was not at a go; it was for a period of time.

“We have projects: school renovation, transformer, office renovations, and as we are in and out of the office, officers move from here then, then on supervision of schools, it’s all riverine, we move around with labour and all that. We are not talking about funds missing. It’s not missing. The projects were done. All the projects that those things were meant for are done, in fact, completed. We got the necessary procedure before the projects.”

She insisted that she had all documents to back her official dealings in the commission, reiterating that “the record will speak for itself.”

The second Engineer Olukorede Adeshina-Oladapo, who is the Director of Project Planning and Development at OSOPADEC, said he was invited over an allegation trending on social media.

He said, “What was on social media was not actually correct, the way it was presented.
“In the office, we got an approval from Mr Governor to carry out a direct labour job, like we have a 21-school renovation, we have the area office renovation, we have the construction of culverts in Atijere, then there’s one—the renovation of an office, office complex, there’s one small office complex. And those transactions were done by direct labour.

“We have this open procurement committee, not the secretary, not the officers alone. We have a group of other management staff involved with this, with records, and the signing of meetings attended. So we report to the ODPP [Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions], they benchmarked those project requests.

“It wasn’t just that 21 that was approved by Mr Governor; we have it. We just picked those that are urgent, and we think we can easily attend to them, so they picked those ones. Those are what we did.”

“Before we proceeded, after the approval of Mr Governor, we requested ODPP to grant us “no objection” for us to implement, and we were given. So as we are completing the project too, we are further going forward requesting them to give us a certificate of completion. Some are already completed out of these projects, but for others that are not yet completed, some funds are still in the account. So no fund is missing as it is.”