Femi Falana (SAN) has threatened to sue the Muhammadu Buhari-led administration if it goes ahead with its plan to borrow to finance the 2016 budget.
He
said the government should make frantic efforts to recover debts owed
it by different groups and institutions instead of borrowing fresh loan.
This was contained in a letter the human rights lawyer wrote to the Minister of finance, Kemi Adeosun.
Falana
said the government plans to apply for a loan of $2.5 billion from the
World Bank and $1 billion from the African Development Bank for the
purpose of financing the 2016 Budget, in spite of its debt profile of
$64 billion.
He
disclosed that the Federal Government is owed no less than $66.5
billion, stressing that this fund should be recovered as quick as
possible.
He listed the recoverable debts to
include “the potential recoverable revenues payable to the Federation
Account are not less than $20,221,018,007.00 (Twenty billion, two
hundred and twenty one million, eighteen thousand, and seven hundered
dollars only).”
According to five cycles of
independent audit reports compiled by the National Extractive Industries
Transparency Initiative (NEITI), "The debts were said to have arisen
from“underpayment/underassessment of taxes, royalties, levies and
rents,”
Falana also noted that on October 4, 2006,
the Central Bank of Nigeria apportioned $7 billion to 14 Nigerian banks
to “manage” out of the nation’s external reserves, which stood at
$38.07 billion, as at the end of July, 2006.
According to him, “the amount involved represented 18.39 per cent of the total external reserves at the material time.
In
the same vein, following the crisis of global capitalism, which
occurred in 2008, the Central Bank of Nigeria gave a bailout of $4
billion (N600 billion) to the commercial banks in the country.
Falana
said “the CBN has not deemed it fit to ask for the refund of the total
sum of $11 billion injected into the banking system in the space of two
years.”
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