Big scandal rocking the the board of the Sovereign Wealth Authority over an alleged N250,000 per sitting allowance for each member.

A major scandal is rocking the board of the Sovereign Wealth Authority over an alleged N250,000 per sitting allowance for each member. The discovery was made by a committee of the public accounts committee of the House of Representatives, which has now ordered that it should be furnished with all the vouchers concerning such payments within eight days. 

SWA board members were reportedly indicted by the report of the office of the auditor-general to the federation from 2010 through 2013. Vanguard reports that the revelation was made while the committee was vetting the accounts of the authority during an investigative hearing recently. It was even more alarming, according to the report, that some of the vouchers revealed that there were as many as four entries for sittings in just one day. 

 In such cases, the board members made up to N1 million sitting four times in one day for each board member. The managing director of SWA, Mr Uche Ubosi, told the lawmakers: “It is the standard practice of sovereign wealth authorities world-wide to pay sitting allowances to board members.” According to the report, the statement from Ubosi angered the lawmakers who said he must produce evidence of such payments where board members were paid as much as N1 million per day. The chairman of PAC, Kingsley Chinda, reportedly ordered that all relevant documents, not photocopies, should be submitted to this committee within the next eight days. 

“You are also expected to furnish this committee with concrete evidence of where authorities pay as much as N250,000 per sitting in other climes,” he said.