EFCC, ICPC Lack Capacity to Investigate - Adoke

allAfrica.com/Daily Trust

Abdul-Rahman Abubakar 1 July 2011

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Independent Corrupt Practices and other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) lack the capacity to conduct comprehensive investigation on fraudulent activities, former Justice Minister and Attorney General of the Federation, Mohammed Bello Adoke (SAN), said yesterday.

Speaking during Senate confirmation hearing for ministerial nominees, Adoke said the agencies lacked the professional expertise to conduct investigations and often arraigned suspects even before gathering enough evidence to prosecute them.

"Most of our anti-corruption agencies lack the capacity to conduct investigation. It is because we are too much in hurry to prosecute people. We do too much trial on the pages of newspapers and disgrace people even before evidence is compiled," he said.

Adoke said as Attorney General, government could not prosecute several high profile cases of corruption due to lack of sufficient evidence to get favourable judgment against those involved.

"Like in the case of Kenny Martins, there was no sufficient evidence; it was just that some people wanted to prosecute him because of differences in opinion. Notwithstanding the fact that they asked us to withdraw this case, we refused to withdraw the case and allowed it to go the whole hug in court and the case was dismissed for want of evidence. So it is not true that I withdrew the case of Kenny Martins.

"In the case of the Vaswani brother, as far back as 2009 there had been a judgment of the court to the effect that the deportation of the Vaswani brothers was wrongful and illegal," he said.

The former Chief Law officer of the country said some high profile Nigerians have been prosecuted erroneously and disgraced but were later found to be innocent of the allegations.

Source:http://allafrica.com/stories/201107010922.html