Naijaonpoint
A fresh finding by SecretsReporters has uncovered how the Nigeria Export Processing Zones Authority (NEPZA) quietly paid out ₦10,428,786,643.79 through three separate financial irregularities during the 2021 and 2022 financial years a period when Prof. Adesoji Adesugba sat as the authority’s Managing Director.
Documents obtained by our reporters show that forty-four payment vouchers, issued to forty-four contractors twenty-two in 2021 and twenty-two in 2022 for various works and services totalling ₦5,747,803,846.00, were processed without the mandatory 100% prepayment check that Paragraph 1705 of the Financial Regulations 2009 requires the Head of Internal Audit to carry out on every voucher before it reaches the Central Pay Office. Not a single one of those forty-four vouchers was passed by NEPZA’s own Internal Audit Unit.
In a second finding, a further ₦3,792,483,416.54 was paid across forty contract vouchers twenty-two in 2021 and eighteen in 2022 to forty contractors, with no sign that advertisement, competitive bidding, technical evaluation, or financial evaluation ever took place at any stage. Paragraph 2909 of the Financial Regulations 2009 demands that every bidder demonstrate technical qualification, equipment and manpower capacity, legal standing, tax compliance, and a clean record free of fraud or financial misappropriation convictions before any contract can be awarded. None of the forty contracts were certified against these requirements.
The third finding concerns six contracts worth ₦888,499,381.25 awarded to three companies, carefully split so that two contracts each went to the same company for identical scopes of work. Mini-buses for empowerment in Osun East Senatorial District were split into two payments of ₦47,746,125.00 and ₦96,492,250.00. Motorcycles and deep freezers for farmers across the six geopolitical zones were split into ₦99,576,667.50 and ₦299,068,917.50.
Road rehabilitation contracts in Lagos’s Mushin and Oshodi-Isolo federal constituencies were split into ₦188,149,080.00 and ₦158,466,341.25 respectively. Section 20(2)(e) of the Public Procurement Act 2007 places direct responsibility on the Accounting Officer of every procuring entity to ensure no procurement is split or reduced in value specifically to evade the appropriate procurement method and its corresponding approval threshold.
Source: …Secretsreporters