National Lottery Trust Fund led by Dr. Bello Maigari was alleged to have been involved in some discrepancies in the area of awarding contracts without following due process. The Senate committee championed to look into their cause has accused agency, NLTF and its runners of over N7bn fraud.
The agency through their Chairman Chief Executive Director, Dr. Bello has reacted to the said allegation.

“To public primary schools in Nigeria, over 2500 public primary schools are benefiting from 9 sets of sports, basketball, volleyball, soccer, handball etc, they are all here, and the names and schools of the beneficial are all here with their telephone numbers, you all can view, I can give you copies, and it took us pains to go through the process of this procurement.

Initially we had to obtain the approval of the minister to approve our budget, which we did, the budget of 1.1billion, having obtained the approval of Mr President Muhammadu Buhari, which is here with me dated 10th Feb 2014. The procurement involves option; we had to engage a consultant who knows the terrain. International business is not an easy thing, most of us do know this, you can easily be swindled, so you must know that you dealing with the right entity and that is why we took the pain to also engage a consultant who enables us to fashion out the process to procure and ship these sets of equipment to Nigeria and got them cleared at the port as well.

After handed them over to the agency, we will now distribute them to almost2500public primary schools across Nigeria. I can tell you this is the largest and most comprehensive intervention that we have ever taken in this agency. It was conducted in a manner that is opened and transparent. We have obtained due process, no certificate objection from BPP. We proceeded to the ministry of Special Duties and intergovernmental Affairs, to obtain the approval of Federal Executive Council and the conveyance of this decision is also here, communicating to us by the ministry.

So I can tell you we are opposed to anything that would tarnish the image of the organization. If you go round, you can sample the opinion of our staff, we employ due diligence in what we do, anything that comes to the image of this organization we don’t take it lightly at all."

Reacting to the alleged N7b contract fraudulently awarded and how he was said to have spent much more than what was budgeted for, Dr. Maigari said, “there is no such thing as N7billion, what we submitted to the committee and finance is here. We submitted our remittance status of 2014 to 2019, it is N6.3 billion and not N7billion, you all can see it. It’s not N7billion at all. When we submitted to the committee, the chairman directed that we should go and reconcile with the Nation Lottery Regulatory System.....because they said they didn’t have records of that on their system.

To me, I feel it’s their duties as the regulators to, not only render accounts on what we receive for good, but they should also render accounts of the prices Nigerians win when playing lottery. Also they should render accounts on what operators make on annual basis. It is strange and thereby shocking to say they do not have records of these figures. And that we should go back to reconcile simply shows that there is gross incompetence, and I think we, as Nigerians should not accept that, they should always be detailed…
It’s even shown here that in 2014 we received N496, 354.000 billion,{four hundred and ninety six Billion, three hundred and fifty four naira} and so on, it kept on increasing within the period of 2014-2019.

We get paid directly from the regulatory commission, because they are the ones who issues the license and monitor the payment of this statutory remittances to NATF, so there is no over spending, this I can say honestly you can spend more than what is appropriated for ,we have rendered all our audited accounts to the office of the Accountant General of the Federation. There is nowhere you would see any query that such a thing has happened and we have also gone beyond that as a responsible organization, because we pride ourselves as people that should be open and transparent to Nigerians ,

When questions are given out ,we were expected to respond ,but no or less time was given, because initially these figures were denied by the commission so that’s why we were directed to go back and reconcile the figures then come back to the committee s but we were shocked to see the nasty headline. For some reason, we were not expecting such from the regulatory since it their responsibility to be on top of the statistics and Information of the industry. We are sure that the things we do in this organization are done well “