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SWITZERLAND, AUGUST 4 – Former Managing Director of United Bank for Africa (UBA), and Chairman, Heirs Holdings, Tony Elumelu, has denied allegations of his involvement in a N41 billion fraud committed against the defunct telecommunication company and national carrier, NITEL.
He has given the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Ethics, Privileges and Public petition, Ayo Akinyelure, seven days to retract his comments linking him (Mr Elumelu) to the fraud.
Lawyers to the banker, in a letter, threatened to sue the lawmaker should he fail to retract the statement and publicly apologise to Mr Elumelu over the fraud allegation.
The committee last Tuesday alleged that UBA defrauded NITEL of about N41 billion from N42 billion that liquidators of the telecommunications company deposited there after being sold to MTEL. The allegation was made on the grounds of petitions forwarded to it to that effect by J .U Ayogu and Co, on behalf of NITEL/MTEL .
Mr Akinyelure told journalists that UBA made unauthorised withdrawals from the accounts of the liquidated telecommunications companies four times and technically stole N41 billion out of the N42 billion that liquidators of the firm deposited there .
As stated in the petition, he said, UBA withdrew N29 billion , N11 billion, N6.8 million and N22 million at different times between 2006 and 2015 from the accounts without relevant tickets or authorisations for that purpose. And liquidators of the firm explained further in the petition that officials of UBA have been hiding under a litigated N685 million it withdrew from the accounts.
“A human rights lawyer had sent a petition on behalf of the liquidators and creditors of NITEL and MTEL, that if the N685million is a subject of litigation, there is a third account meant for taxation and disasters which has N169million. It was also unilaterally withdrawn by the UBA. Seven years after the withdrawal, they’ve not provided the tickets, instead, they were asking the liquidators to get the tickets from the dead liquidators, which is wrong. They had yet to provide the tickets.
“In another account which had N29 billion, UBA also unilaterally withdrew the money from NITEL accounts without authorisation tickets. Most of the creditors of NITEL have sued the liquidators that they’ve collected money from the UBA without paying them. There is another MTEL account N11 billion withdrawn by the UBA and it has not been accounted for till today,”the senator said.
