Following their refusal to appear before the House of Representatives to answer questions on their operations, the Committee on Public Petitions of the green chamber has ordered the immediate arrest of the Central Bank Governor, Mr Olayemi Cardoso, the Accountant General of the Federation, Mrs Oluwatoyin Madein and 17 others.
The decision was taken at the committee’s hearing on Tuesday following the adoption of a motion by Rep Fred Agbedi (PDP-Bayelsa).
The reaction of the invitees was what led to issuing the arrest warrant, Agbedi said while moving the motion, adding that the parliament worked with time and the CEOs had been invited four times, but failed to respond.
He said that the CEOs should be brought to appear before the committee by the Inspector General of Police through a warrant of arrest after due diligence by the Speaker, Rep Tajudeen Abbas.
The Chairman of the Committee, Rep Micheal Irom (APC-Cross River), in his ruling said that the IG should ensure the CEOs were brought before the committee on December 14.
Earlier, the petitioner, Mr Fidelis Uzowanem, said that the petition was anchored on the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) report of 2021.
“We took up the challenge to examine the report and discovered that what NEITI put together is a report is only consolidation of fraud that has been going on in the oil and gas industry.
“It dates back to 2016 because was have been following and we put up a petition to this committee to examine what has happened.
“The 2024 budget of 27.5 trillion that has been proposed can be confidently funded from the recoverable amount that we identified in the NEITI report.
“It is basically a concealment of illegal transactions that took place in NNPCL; they have been in a sink with some oil companies where some companies that did not produce crude were paid cash core, an amount paid for crude oil production,” he said.