No recovered assets will be mismanaged under my watch, EFCC chief says

Ola Olukoyede has rejected calls for one agency to manage all assets recovered by Nigeria’s government agencies, saying the scale of the task would make such a system impractical.

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission chairman said he was speaking from experience after previously serving as the commission’s secretary and managing assets. “I am not a commentator on this, I am a practitioner,” he wrote in a post on X.

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I am not a commentator on this, I am a practitioner.

Olukoyede argued that more than 20 statutory agencies recover assets for the government. The police alone have divisions in nearly every local government and stations in most wards, he said, making it impossible for a single agency to manage police holdings as well as assets recovered by other bodies.

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No single agency could manage the Police holdings alone, let alone everyone else’s.

He also pointed to overseas examples and to AMCON, which was created to manage recovered assets. He said the government lost more than 5 trillion naira through AMCON. Under the Proceeds of Crime Act, he said, each agency should remain responsible for what it recovers, alongside the requirements of Section 31 of the EFCC Act.

At a briefing in Abuja the previous week, Olukoyede said the EFCC had secured interim and final forfeiture orders covering 10,053 tangible assets during his leadership. They included real estate, vehicles, land, electronic items, schools, factories, hotels, oil rigs, barges, machinery and aircraft, as well as 102 tonnes of solid minerals. He said proceeds from finally forfeited assets totaled about 12.07 billion naira and had been paid to the federal government. “Not a pin nor a penny of recovered assets will be mismanaged under my watch,” he pledged.

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Not a pin nor a penny of recovered assets will be mismanaged under my watch.