The Federal Government has rubbished a report by the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS-owned Inter-governmental Action Group on Money Laundering in West Africa that Islamic State West Africa Province, ISWAP, laundered huge sums of money through Nigeria.
However, Nigeria has faulted the report, saying it was not true.
The Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit, NFIU, described the story, as “totally outdated and was based on a 2019 country evaluation report which is literally stale and irrelevant today.
“It is to the knowledge of the international community, our populace and the formal media organisations that several arrests were made through the ongoing Operation Service Wide approved by President Muhammadu Buhari at the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA).”
“In addition, all funding of violence from all sections of the country are being evidently analysed and reported to all relevant authorities according to law.
“It’s true that recently Nigeria fell a victim of illicit financial flows but overt and far-reaching efforts are being executed by government to stem the bad practice.”
Though NFIU disputed the ECOWAS body’s report, it accepted its call to put Nigeria’s Financial System under stricter monitoring.
According to Dikko: “We had formally faulted the report to the ECOWAS body while agreeing to partner with them to carry out further review processes to jointly attain global best practices on all countermeasures against local and cross border violent crimes disturbing entire West Africa presently.
“All our neighbours have proofs of our exchange of terrorist financial intelligence with them real-time.”
