The Delta State Commissioner for Finance, Mr Fidelis Tilije, has stated that the N20bn facility loan that the state governor, Ifeanyi Okowa, is accused of diverting for his election campaign was for an investment in a floating gas company to be situated in Warri.
Tilije said this in an interview with our correspondent on Monday in response to the Delta Grassroots Coalition, which on Sunday made the accusation in a statement signed by its National Coordinator, Dr Kazie Ochie, in Asaba, the state capital.
Tilije said, “The state government gave the company the condition of siting (its operations) in Warri before it could invest in the project.”
According, to the commissioner when completed, the project would provide jobs for citizens and increase the state’s internally-generated revenue.
The group had alleged that Okowa took the loan to enable the company to fund his political ambitions to become the vice president of Nigeria.
The Delta State House of Assembly had on January 27 approved Okowa’s N20bn loan request from a prior letter to the Assembly.
But the group, in its statement, “urged Deltans to rise up and reject the phoney borrowing by the Governor Okowa-led administration in the name of funding an ‘elephant gas project.’”
It alleged that Okowa had “concluded plans to corner and divert the N20bn loan recently approved by the State House of Assembly to acquire three percent equity in the UTM Offshore Limited floating liquefied natural gas project into funding his vice presidential ambition and that of the PDP governorship candidate in the state, Sheriff Oborevwori.”
Punch