George Uboh, who is best remembered for a petition to Nigeria’s upper legislative chamber alleging that the leadership of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) had embezzled more than N1 trillion in assets recovered from economic crime suspects, has threatened to go to court if the Solicitor-General of Nigeria refuses to acknowledge and act upon his letter seeking prosecution of EFCC chairman Ibrahim Lamorde.
The petitioner wrote his original letter to the Solicitor-General on September 18.
In response, the Director of Prosecutions (DPP) of the Federation, Mohammed Saidu Diri, told Mr. Uboh that the EFCC has been given the notice to investigate the claims and get back to him.
Apparently dissatisfied with the implication in the letter of the DPP that the EFCC is capable of investigating its own chairman, Mr. Uboh, in his new letter threatened legal action, asserting the national significance of his allegations.
“[My] allegations backed by overwhelming evidence that EFCC has only remitted 6.7 Billion Naira out of 2.051 Trillion Naira recovered is a matter of national importance that needs to be dealt with in an exigent manner,” he told the Solicitor-General in the letter, dated September 28.
The Senate did begin an investigation of Uboh’s original allegations, but Mr. Lamorde did not attend the committee hearing. Instead, the EFCC issued widely- circulated advertorials and editorials trying to debunk the allegations that its leaders had diverted the huge sums of money as claimed by Mr. Uboh.
The petitioner, who had also earlier expressed his readiness to provide substantial proof of his allegations, did not refer to the EFCC’s claims in his new letter.
Mr. Uboh, now a security professional, was convicted in the early 1990s by a United States court on credit card offences, and jailed. When
SaharaReporters asked him if he was the same George Uboh who was jailed in the US for that offence, Mr. Uboh confirmed the information, but stated that a US Court of Appeal has dismissed some of the charges.
In view of the fact that Mr. Uboh’s deadline lapsed three weeks ago, it is unclear if he has filed the legal action that he promised.