The $620,000 bribery standoff between Representative Farouk Lawan and oil magnate Femi Otedola took another dramatic twist today in Abuja as the Chairman of the House Committee on Drugs, Narcotics and Financial Crimes, Representative Jagaba Adams Jagaba, denied ever receiving $500,000 from the suspended Lawan.
Rep. Jagaba specifically demanded that the chairman of the Ad hoc Committee on Petroleum Subsidy Investigation stop saying he had passed on to him along with a handwritten letter attached to it, the sum of $500,000 as an “exhibit” he collected from Chief Otedola.
Jagaba was addressing a press conference during which he described Lawan’s allegations as lies, and threatened to sue if his colleague continued to drag his name into the controversy.
He said: “I am a see-through glass, I have nothing to hide. Hon. Farouk Lawan alleged that he wrote a letter to me attaching $500,000. That is callously untrue and in fact, calculated to smear my hard-earned reputation, a reputation I painstakingly built since 1999. I never received any letter, or money, or any other exhibit from Farouk Lawan. I saw for the first time the purported letter on a page of the Leadership Newspaper, page 6 of 14th June, 2012; and the closest copy which I saw and touched, was the copy he presented to the Police Special Task Force (STF) investigating the bribery scandal, when I went there on 10th July, 2012.”
He told the story of his invitation by the Special Task Force (STF) of the police which is investigating the matter, which came recently while he was in South Africa for the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association Summit.
