N195bn unspent pension fund missing —Senate

THE Senate has revealed that the unspent pension funds for the last five years, amounting to N195 billion, could not be accounted for.

The revelation was made on Tuesday by Senator Aloysius Etok, chairman of the Senate Joint Committee on Establishment, Public Service, State and Local Government, during a public hearing on the pension fraud.

The committee also frowned on the failure of chairman of the Pension Tax Team, Alhaji Abdulrasheed Maina, to appear before it, warning that he would not be granted any other hearing on the fraud investigation if he fail to make an appearance today.

Senator Etok said after the submission of its report to the Senate for consideration, Maina had organised several media fora, claiming that he was not given fair hearing during the investigation of the management of the pension fund.

A member of the committee, Senator Kabiru Gaya, put the total of the unspent funds between 2007 and 2012 as N195 billion.

Based on the report of the Accountant-General of the Federation, Gaya said detailed the fund as: Police Pension Office, N131,483,873,694.63 released; N58,270,660,632.00 spent and N44,213,213,062 unaccounted for.

For the Military Pension Board, N317,609,082,566.05 was released; N294,076,743,532.87 spent and N23,532,339,034.00 unaccounted for.

For Customs, Immigration, Prisons Pension Office, Senator Gaya said N85,249,222,900.16 was released;  N27,452,200,993.72 was spent, while N27,797,822,127 was unaccounted.

The State Department Service Pension, he said, had N34,698,149,304.68 allocated, N9,413,090,416.00 spent and a balance of N26,121,394,662.63 unaccounted for.

For the office of the Head of Service, the sum of N139,056,523,955.20 was released, N100,641,106,957.33 was spent, while N39,783,682,993.00 was unaccounted for.