N423bn fraud: Our report remains, el-Rufai is lying — Kaduna Assembly

Yesterday, the Kaduna State House of Assembly declared that it was sticking with the report that accused former Governor Nasir el-Rufai of embezzling N423, 115,028,072.88.

The House claimed that the few political appointees who spoke at a press event in Abuja on Tuesday represented no one but themselves and had been engaging in frantic, fruitless attempts to malign the House and conceal the purported fraud committed by the el-Rufai administration.

According to the House, “If they genuinely have the interest of Kaduna State and are truly men and women of integrity, they would have applied themselves to developing the state instead of participating in the alleged pilfering of its scarce resources,”

Chairman Fact-Finding Committee and Deputy Speaker of the Assembly, Henry Magaji in a statement said among others, “The attention of the Kaduna State House of Assembly has been drawn to a press conference addressed by some senior political appointees of the immediate past administration of Malam Nasir El-Rufai.

“In the press conference, the former political appointees made strenuous efforts to pick holes in the report of the Probe Committee. They resorted to name calling and wild allegations on the motivations for the House Probe. We wish to state as follows:

“The press conference was just a rehash of the vituperations and innuendoes heaped on us by the former political appointees in their first press briefing. There was nothing new that should warrant our response. They failed to address the main issue, which is the systematic and coordinated cornering of the resources of Kaduna State through phoney contracts and outright looting.”