By Sahara Reporters
While Ayodele Oke, the Director-General of the Nigerian Intelligence Agency (NIA) has claimed that the $43 million, N23.2 million and £27,800 (N13billion) cash found in an apartment in Lagos last week belongs to his agency, information available to SaharaReporters suggests that the woman seen hauling the money into the apartment in Ghana-Must-Go bags may have been Folashade Oke, his wife.Our investigation has revealed that the owners of Apartment 7B gave Folashade Oke, with phone number +2348059833410, as their contact. Sources at the NIA confirmed Folashade to be the spouse of their Director-General, Mr. Oke.The day after the money was discovered, Mr. Oke had told SaharaReporters he could not verify any information about the money as he had not read any report linking his agency to the cash.After pledging to speak to us thereafter, he did not take any calls until he suddenly announced that the money belonged to NIA, and that it had been approved by President Goodluck Jonathan for certain “covert” activities.One of the whistleblowers responsible for the discovery told our correspondent that since he started working on the property as a guard, a woman who spoke fluent Yoruba repeatedly brought huge bags of money to Apartment 7B. That particular property was known to guards as Apartment “Dash-Dash” because in the records there were two dashes where the name of the owner ought to be.He recalled that on two occasions, he helped the woman, who was always curiously dressed in a haggardly way, to carry the money to “Dash-Dash”. The woman, on the first occasion, gave him N10,000 as a gift, and on the second, N500.He said the woman would spend about two hours in the apartment, then go freshen up in the gym at the back of the building before leaving. An EFCC source also told SaharaReporters that the reason they went ahead and raided the apartment was because the EFCC has in the past year investigated several NIA operatives involved in corruption, finding widespread malfeasance within the agency, with several NIA operatives owning hotels, apartment buildings and luxury cars in Abuja and elsewhere.
That background may have emboldened the EFCC chairman to ignore pleas by Mr. Oke when he arrived suddenly at the EFCC offices asking them to call off the raid after they had already commenced.
The question now is: how did Mrs. Oke become involved in discreetly and personally ferrying money supposedly belonging to the federal government into a private apartment she appears to own, and apparently trying to hide it there? Meanwhile, the whistleblowers have also said they are certain that at least two other apartments in the building, which is now being watched, may also contain large sums of money. But they did not confirm if they passed any details of this information to the EFCC.
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