Does the EFCC care about your money?

TUNDE OYEDOYIN

Tunde Oyedoyin is a London-based personal finance coach and founder of Money Intelligence Coaching Academy, a specialist academy of personal finance. He can be reached as follows: +447846089587 (WhatsApponly); E-mail: tu5oyed@gmail.com

The fear of EFCC is the beginning of wisdom — common saying

Several years ago, yours truly was present inside a courtroom at the Southwark Crown Court, when the founding chairman of the much feared Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, took to the witness box as a Crown Prosecution witness.

It was in a legendary case against a former governor in the Federal Republic. The Crown eventually succeeded in yanking off some of the assets that the former number one citizen of the particular oil rich state had cornered.

His testimony was detailed and robust. Little wonder the name of the organisation drives the fear of God into the hearts of those who have helped themselves to the public pot. Besides, many have tweaked a popular biblical verse to say that it isn’t just the fear of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom, but that the fear of EFCC itself is equally the beginning of wisdom. There’s definitely a truism in the latter, especially if you have done what you should not do with public money.

But aside from EFCC’s name being the cause of many former and serving public officials’ nightmares, did you know that the commission actually cares about your personal finance? I didn’t know that and wouldn’t have bet even my Sunday lunch of pounded yam and okra soup, of a few weeks ago, on it until recently. That was when the organisation came out to warn us of con-artists operating Ponzi scheme investments in our country. In the Guardian newspaper of March 13, was a list of over fifty companies we were warned not to invest in.

According to the report, “EFCC uncovers 58 illegal ponzi scheme operators,” the paper said the anti-corruption body: “has alerted Nigerians on the operations of 58 companies posturing as investing entities and defrauding innocent Nigerians of their hard-earned money.” Quoting EFCC spokesperson, Dele Oyewale, who made the disclosure in Abuja, the ‘flagship’ noted that the move: “was in line with the commission’s commitment to sanitising the country’s financial space and offering the investing public adequate and reliable information on the activities of illegal ponzi scheme operators across the country.”

EFCC went further to say: “the companies are neither registered with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) nor the Security Exchange Commission (SEC),” and that “the two regulators, in separate correspondences with the EFCC, denied that they are registered with them.”

Among the organisations named and shamed by the EFCC are: Wales Kingdom Capital, Bethseida Group of Companies, AQM Capital Limited, Titan Multibusiness Investment Limited, Brickwall Global Investment Limited, Farmforte Limited & Agro Partnership Tech, Green Eagles Agricbusiness Solution Limited, Richfield Multiconcepts Limited, Forte Asset Management Limited, (Biss Networks Nigeria Limited, S Mobile Netzone Limited, Pristine Mobile Network), and Letsfarm Integrated Services.

If you have any money with any of them or planning to invest in any of these or the rest on the list of those mentioned by EFCC, please go get your money and don’t ever think of having anything to do with them. It doesn’t matter whether you have a relative there. Run, run, run and go get your money out.

With this unprecedented move, the EFCC has demonstrated that it actually cares about your personal finance and not just about running looters out of town.

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