PDP, Secondus Rocked By Allegation Of Misappropriating N10bn In 3 Years

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has been jolted over allegation of fraud and misappropriation of about N10 billion.

In a leaked memo by the party’s audit department on Wednesday, the National Auditor of the party, Adamu Mustapha, accused the leadership of financial impropriety.

The memo disclosed that the audit department has been denied access to all transaction by the Uche Secondus-led National Working Committee (NWC) which is against the constitution of the party.

The memo read in part: “The purpose of this alarm is to bring to the notice of this NWC the inability of the Audit Department to perform its functions as enshrined by the constitution and the extant laws, to illustrate as example, the Audit Department was incapacitated by lack of access to the necessary inputs that will enable it to discharge its duties.

“For whatever reasons, there is no access to all financial transactions (cash inflows and outflows) documents of the party like cashbooks, receipts, vouchers, registers, cheques and bank statements etc, all of which are necessary input for pre-audit, due process, internal control, reconciliation as well as to draw up our Final Accounts, and all these necessary inputs are not available to the Audit Department.

“In order for the Audit to function there should be constant interaction and information flow between the Audit Department and all the arms of the party, unfortunately, this has not been the practice,” he alleged, in the memo seen by The Premium Times.

Part of the issues raised included N500 million taken by the party without approval and the unaccounted billions of naira made from the sale of forms and membership cards.

“From the inception of this NWC to date over NI0 billion was generated and unaccounted for.

“Non-competitive contract was assigned to print congress documents at the cost of N630 million. While it is believed that the actual cost is much less than N150 million if competitively decided by the NWC,” the memo said.

Following the event on Wednesday, Mustapha was summoned by the party to recount the financial issues raised in the memo to the press on Thursday.

He confirmed that the memo was credible while the issues raised “have been enumerated in the NWC meeting”.

Although the memo had incited negative reactions, Mustapha said he had raised the issue several times in various NWC meetings, but to no avail.

However, in an interview with Premium Times on Friday, the party’s spokesperson, Kola Ologbodiyan said the memo “didn’t make any allegations of financial impropriety against the chairman or any member of the NWC”.

Rather, he said the “media misrepresented us”.