Governor Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State said Monday that he was offered $80million bribe to drop his objection to the settlement of the $418million judgment debts purportedly owed by states and their local governments in securing the Paris Club refunds.
He told PREMIUM TIMES in an exclusive interview that he was offered the money after he rejected an initial $40 million offer.
Mr Fayemi, who is the Chairman of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF), said the fixers who approached him over the matter, also raised the offer to $80 million when they could not break his resistance with the initial $40million offer.
He said he similarly rejected the $80million offer in the interest of justice.
PREMIUM TIMES, in extensive reports on the matter, revealed how Mr Fayemi since taking over as the NGF Chairman has been making efforts to stop the planned payments, demanding a forensic audit to determine the legitimacy of the entire $418 million debts which translates to about N159 billion.
Our reports revealed that President Muhammadu Buhari’s Chief of Staff, Ibrahim Gambari, along with the Minister of Finance, Zainab Ahmed, and the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF), Abubakar Malami, has been scrambling to have the purported creditors hurriedly paid, despite the red flags Mr Fayemi-led NGF, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), and the Association of Local Governments of Nigeria (ALGON), have raised against it.
A follow-up story later published by another media platform after our first report, however, accused Mr Fayemi of demanding 10 per cent of the total amount at stake to drop his objection to the payment.
The NGF denied the allegation, but PREMIUM TIMES went further to contact Mr Fayemi for his personal response to the allegation.
Responding to our enquiry, Mr Fayemi said the claim was being bandied around to smear him and blackmail him into submission.
