The Managing Director of Nigeria Incentive-based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending, Mr Aliyu A. Abdulhameed, has summarily “dismissed” the organisation’s Acting Head of Internal Audit, Mr Olalekan Olusanya, in bid to conceal a deep-rooted multi-billion naira fraud, SaharaReporters has discovered.
Aliyu had been siphoning money from the establishment since he was appointed to office in 2015.
As Head of Internal Audit, Olusanya unearthed several financial scandals, which he communicated to the MD and other heads of units.
However, rather than take action, the MD instructed him to drop the reports.
On November 4, 2019, the Board Audit Committee, which is a high powered delegation of the CBN headed by Mr Edward L. Adamu, deputy governor of CBN Corporate Services, held a meeting with Olusanya and his team of auditors.
Shortly before the meeting with the CBN deputy governor, Aliyu ordered Olusanya to strike out details of fraud from his report.
Uncomfortable with the instruction, Olusanya craftily sent the fraud related documents from his official email to his personal email in order to retain the evidence to himself for the sake of future defence if the need arises.
In December 2019, the Nigerian Senate received a petition from concerned Nigerians indicting the MD of fraud, corruption, money laundering and related cases.
However, Aliyu believed that the petition against him was instigated by Olusanya, who had access to the company’s financial transactions and had discovered many frauds.
Insiders in NIRSAL informed SaharaReporters that Aliyu is on a viscous witch-hunt of perceived enemies.
On December 11, 2019, Aliyu ordered a query to be issued on Olusanya, asking him to explain why he breached the email policy of the company by sending official documents to himself.
Afterwards, Olusanya’s official laptop and phone were seized from him.
On January 6, 2020, Olusanya was redeployed from Internal Audit to Agricultural Extension and Field Services Unit.
Even though he resumes work by 8:00am and closes at 5:00pm, his official laptop and phone which were seized were not returned while his official email was suspended.
He was being paid salaries but not assigned any job or given any job description, an effort to make him redundant so as to subject him to psychological trauma.
On April 30, 2020, Olusanya resigned from NIRSAL following several traumatic situations.
His resignation was officially received at the head office of NIRSAL on May 13, 2020, having paid a month’s salary in lieu of resignation and having dropped all official documents in his custody.
On May 27, 2020, two weeks after acknowledging his resignation letter and four weeks after his initial resignation email, Olusanya received a letter of summary dismissal from NIRSAL.
Insiders informed SaharaReporters that this was not the first time Aliyu would sack people for doing nothing wrong.
In July 2017, seven employees of NIRSAL, who were all employed three months earlier, were sacked unceremoniously after the MD alleged that they were not be loyal to him.