Senate president, Bukola Saraki has said the Senate committee on finance and public accounts will do a thorough job in its investigation into the use of Remita following an allegation by Senator Dino Melaye.
Senator Dino Melaye alleged the collection of N25 billion commission being one per cent of the alleged N2.5 trillion it remitted into the TSA.
Senator Melaye had earlier claimed illegality and exorbitant commission charged for the deployment of Remita, an e-payment software used for the transfer of Federal Government’s funds from financial institutions into a single treasury account (TSA).
Dino said Remita collected N25 billion “for doing nothing” and argued that the use of Remita was a violation of Section 162(1) of the constitution, which stated that “the federation shall maintain a special account to be called the federation account into which all revenues collected by the government of the federation except the proceeds from the personal income tax of the personnel of the Armed Forces of the Federation, the Nigeria Police Force, the ministry or department of government charged with foreign affairs and the residents of the FCT, Abuja”.
Speaking on Monday, November 16, via his verified Twitter account, @bukolasaraki, the Senate president who himself is currently facing corruption charges at the code of conduct tribunal said the issue is very important.
“TSA issue is a very important subject. The committee will do a diligent job that will come up with standard & quantify nature of the motion,” Saraki tweeted.
Interestingly, investigation by Premium Times has revealed that Senator Dino Melaye’s claims are wrong with the CBN Director for public communications, Ibrahim Muazu, dismissed the claim as “completely misleading.”
“That is false. That is false. It is grossly exaggerated. We are talking of one per cent. What is one per cent of the money? Have we collected up to a trillion? That is completely misleading information. Even at the beginning of the TSA the estimation of all the movement of federal government funds into the account is N1.2 trillion. I cannot give you the exact amount now but I know it is far, far, far lower than N2.5 trillion,” he told a Premium Times reporter.
Meanwhile, the Ekiti state governor, Ayodele Fayose, in a recent statement on Sunday, November 15, vowed not to partake in the meeting scheduled between the federal government and the state governors stressing that he did not believe in the Treasury Single Account (TSA).
Fayose said that Ekiti state was entitled to its own policies and that it was not under any obligation to accept federal government policies, especially the TSA which he described as already been robed in the garment of fraud.
