Stolen assets: Only small percentage recovered by Nigeria- ICPC chair

The Chairman of Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission (ICPC), Mr Ekpo Nta, has lamented the inability of Nigeria to access stolen assets from where corrupt Nigerians lodged them.

He said only small percentage of recovered the assets had so far been returned to victim-states by the receiving-states.
Ekpo Nta made this known during the J K Gadzama 7th Annual Public Lecture held at the Sheraton Hotels and Towers Abuja.

The ICPC boss was the Chairman at the occasion held under the theme, “Money Laundering And Financial Crime: Problems of International Enforcement”.
He said, “It is not enough to recover stolen assets, but priority must be paid to the systematic and timely return of such stolen assets money to their countries of origin.”

Nta told the audience, which included two former Chief Justices of Nigeria, Justice Muhammed Lawal Uwais (GCON) and Justice Alfa Belgore, that the delay in the return of the recovered stolen funds “is now attracting discussions at the appropriate international fora on ways of reducing or eliminating discordant national laws or processes that hamper the tracing, recovery and repatriation of stolen assets especially to third world countries.”

He said the sophistication of money laundering and related offences had been growing geometrically to the extent that normal national and international policing could not keep pace.  
This, he said, had resulted in the setting up of  specialized inter-governmental bodies like the United Nations Office on Drugs and Agencies (UNODC), international initiatives like The Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative (STAR).