Court orders interim forfeiture of $43m, £27,800, N23m found in Ikoyi House to FG
In what can be described as galloping rise in star performance on the side of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) since the Acting Chairman, Mr. Ibrahim Magu failed integrity test at the Nigerian Senate, the agency, yesterday secured a Federal High Court Order in Lagos for the temporary forfeiture of the sums of $43,449,947, £27,800 and N23,218,000 it recovered from an apartment in the Ikoyi area of Lagos on Wednesday.
In his ruling on Thursday, Justice Muslim Hassan, ordered that the funds be temporarily forfeited to the Federal Government.
However, the ruling provided a window for the owner to show up at the next adjourned date, May 5, 2017, to show cause why the money should not be permanently forfeited to the Federal Government.
A source at the EFCC confided in our correspondent that nobody has so far declared his money missing in and around Ikoyi residential areas.
Before the Wednesday haul, EFCC had made several similar recoveries both in Lagos and Abuja and in far away Kaduna State.
A banker with one of the new generation banks on grounds of anonymity said Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) resort to keeping their looks at homes because of the effective implementation of Bank verification Numbers (BVN) which has the capacity to link all accounts belonging to anybody at one time.
The banker added further that one of the key fears of PEPs is that they do not want people to know their real worth because it will be very hard to explain and that is why they hide their money at palatial homes and uncompleted houses but with guards.
