It has been revealed that the rivalry between the Ministry of Justice, the EFCC and the DSS led to the controversial raid and arrest of some alleged corrupt judges last weekend.
The Federal Ministry of Justice reportedly bypassed the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission
(EFCC), which has the statutory mandate to investigate economic crimes,
because it failed to act on previous petitions forwarded to it.
Some
human rights groups were said to have forwarded petitions to the
Federal Ministry of Justice when the EFCC failed to investigate and
prosecute the judges.
According to Punch, based on this, the ministry decided to forward the petitions against the judges to the Department of State Service (DSS).
The EFCC and Ministry of Justice no longer have a friendly and collaborative relationship, it was learnt.
It
was gathered that the working relationship between the two government
bodies strained due the inability of the EFCC to speedily investigate
some of the cases forwarded to it by the ministry.
The
newspaper cited a government source, who gave the example of a petition
on the withdrawal of over N11 billion from the Rivers State
Government’s account between October 2015, and February 2016.
The Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Mr. Abubakar Malami, had in March this year directed the anti-graft agency to investigate the withdrawal, which was described as suspicious.
"From
all indications, because of the EFCC’s seeming inaction on some of
these cases, the ministry of justice has now resorted to forwarding the
petitions to the DSS. Obviously the EFCC is not happy with this," the
source was quoted to have said.
Report also said
the EFCC is bitter about the weekend crackdown on some of the judges of
the Supreme, Appeal and High courts across the country because the
agency was already investigating them.
A top
government source was quoted as saying: "The point of disagreement came
from the investigation into the petitions. While the EFCC thought that
the DSS should steer clear of the petitions because it had already
worked on them, the service and the Federal Ministry of Justice insisted
that the commission was slow in its investigations."
According
to a source at the EFCC, but for the rivalry, the DSS should have
carried the Commission along in the case of the alleged corrupt judges.
The
source said the EFCC believed that the DSS interrupted its ongoing
investigations into the corruption allegations against the judges.
"It
is a DSS operation. The EFCC is not involved. The raids carried out on
the judges’ residents have affected our ongoing investigation into the
activities of some of the judges," the source said.
"What
this has done is that they have alerted those suspected judges. With
what they have done, they have alerted them to be careful."
In what it called a sting operation, the DSS had last Friday and Saturday arrested Sylvester Ngwuta and Inyang Okoro, both of the Supreme Court; the suspended Presiding Justice of the Court of Appeal, Ilorin Division, Justice Mohammed Tsamiya; Justice Kabiru Auta of the Kano State High Court and Justice Adeniyi Ademola of the Federal High Court, Abuja.
Others arrested were a former Chief Judge of Enugu State, Justice I. A. Umezulike, and Muazu Pindiga of the Federal High Court, Gombe Division.
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