Ifeanyi Ubah quizzed by EFCC for Scam

From FRED ITUA, Abuja
Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC)
yesterday quizzed business mogul and Managing Director
of Capital Oil and Gas Industries Limited, Mr Ifeanyi Ubah.
According to EFCC’s spokesman, Wilson Uwujaren, Ubah
was quizzed in Abuja. Uwujaren claimed in an interview
with Daily Sun that Ubah had ignored several invitations to
come to EFCC for interrogations regarding his role in the
fuel subsidy scam.
“We’ve Ifeanyi Ubah in our custody,” Wilson revealed. “He
was quizzed in Abuja by operatives of the EFCC. He’s
currently being interrogated by our operatives. “His arrest is
sequel to his refusal to honour our series of invitation over
his involvement in the fuel subsidy scam. We sent several
invitations to him to come and respond to some questions,
which he failed to do. When you invite someone and he fails
to honour it, what do you do? You’ve to arrest him or her to
respond to such allegations. I can’t tell you what our next
step of action will be.
Our officers interrogating him can affirm that,” Wilson
added. It would be recalled that Ubah was arrested last year
and kept in the custody of Special Fraud Unit (SFU) of the
Nigeria Police for over a week based on the petition by
Coscharis boss, Cosmas Maduka, over a business deal that
went bad. In an interim investigative police report on the
involvement of Capital Oil and Gas Limited in the fuel
subsidy scam, it was reported that Ubah and four of the
company’s staff, colluded with others to defraud the Federal
Government of Nigeria of billions of naira. According to the
report, the four indicted staffers of Capital Oil are its
Executive Director, Operations, Mr. Orji Joseph; General
Manager, Operations, Mr. Ogbuokiri Chibuzor; Depot
Manager, Mr. Okorie Onuabuchi; and Head of Training, Mr.
Nsikan Usoro. According to the report, Capital Oil was
involved in 26 transactions covering the importation of
538,740,000,000 litres of petrol and was paid N43.291
billion as subsidy claims in 2011.
The report also detailed the arrest and interrogation of Ubah
and four others by the SFU between September and October.
It was allegedly discovered that during the period under
review that irregular claims were made based on fraudulent
fabrication and forged documents to the tune of about
N43.291 billion paid to Capital Oil as subsidy claims. As at
the time of filing in this report, it was unclear whether Ubah
was going to be charged to court by EFCC or granted
administrative bail, as it has become the practice.