ICPC arraigns Nigerian Immigration Officer who allegedly received N17.6 million salaries from 3 Agencies

The ICPC arraigned him before Justice Binta Dogonyaro of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) High Court, Apo, according to its statement on Wednesday.

The anti-graft agency charged Mr. Aseku on nine counts bordering on abuse of office and corruption.

According to the ICPC, “the defendant allegedly received N4.2 million in salaries from the Nasarawa State Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology in 2015 while working as a school teacher, despite being on active duty with the NIS.”

He was also alleged to have drawn N13.4 million in salaries from the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) between 2018 and 2019 while employed by the Immigration Service.

Mr. Aseku was further accused of allegedly facilitating the payment of N4.7 million in salaries to seven individuals who were neither employees of the NIS nor on its payroll.

“That you, Abubakar Mohammed Aseku, between October 2018 and October 2019, in Abuja, while serving as an Assistant Superintendent Immigration Officer, used your position to confer corrupt advantage upon yourself by receiving a total sum of N13,400,889.90 in salaries from the Department of Petroleum Resources, while concurrently employed by the Nigerian Immigration Service, thereby committing an offence contrary to and punishable under Section 19 of the Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Act, 2000.”

The development comes days after the  ICPC chairman, Dr. Musa Aliyu, had disclosed that the agency identified and arrested individuals responsible for manipulating the payroll system, including one case where a government worker added his family members to the system.

“We have been able to track and recover this amount of money, and we also identified people that are inserting ghost workers in the system. We even discovered that somebody had put his wife, his son, and his in-laws on the payroll,” he said.

According to him, the agency recovered over N20 billion in pension deductions from salaries allocated to ghost workers in 2024.