House of Reps orders arrest of CBN governor, 17 others 

The House of Representatives Committee on Public Petitions has issued a warrant of arrest on the Central Bank Governor, Mr Olayemi Cardoso, the Accountant General of the Federation, Mrs Oluwatoyin Madein and top government officials over their failure to appear before the lawmakers.

The call for the arrest of the top government officials follows the adoption of a motion by Rep Fred Agbedi (PDP-Bayelsa) at the committee’s hearing on Tuesday.

He explained that the legal step became needful due to the lackadaisical attitude of the governor of the apex bank and others who have been invited for about four different occasions.

Earlier, Mr Fidelis Uzowanem, the main petitioner 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.