The Department of State Services (DSS), Nigeria’s secret police, has released Abdulaziz Yari, a former governor of Zamfara State, after detaining him for his alleged involvement in a N45 billion election fund scandal.
Yari, who is also a serving senator, was arrested by the DSS on Friday following revelations by the detained governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Godwin Emefiele, that he received N45 billion from the CBN to fund the reelection of former President Muhammadu Buhari in 2019.
Newsflash Nigeria gathered that Yari regained his freedom on Saturday night after intense pressure from some influential politicians.
Emefiele has been in the custody of the DSS since the second week of June after his suspension by President Bola Tinubu’s administration, which is probing him for corruption and abuse of office.
Newsflash Nigeria had reported how Emefiele also implicated the suspended chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Abdulrasheed Bawa, as an accomplice in the Naira redesign scam that rocked the country months ago.
Yari was one of the loyalists of the Buhari cabal who defied the zoning arrangement of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and contested for the Senate Presidency against Godswill Akpabio, Tinubu’s protégé and current Senate President.
Yari lost to Akpabio who got 63 votes out of 109 senators during the inauguration of the 10th National Assembly in June.
Sources said that both Emefiele and Bawa exposed Yari’s shady deals with the CBN governor, which prompted the DSS to go after him.
“DSS agents have been tracking him (Yari) since he returned from London for medical care soon after he lost the Senate Presidency. The detained EFCC chair Bawa also revealed how Yari was doing deals with Emefiele. Emefiele in turn accused Bawa of working for Yari,” one of the sources said.
Yari had lobbied the leaders of opposition parties and spent billions of Naira on his ambition to become the Senate President, SaharaReporters reports.
However, he was betrayed by some of them who switched their allegiance to Akpabio at the last minute.
In August 2022, SaharaReporters reported how Yari and the suspended Accountant-General of the Federation (AGF), Ahmed Idris, siphoned about N8 billion and $2.2 billion from nine oil-rich states.
According to an EFCC official, Yari and Idris colluded with a company owned by Olusegun Akindele, a co-defendant, to divert 11.5 per cent of $2.2 billion due to the nine states as their 13 per cent derivation fund from the excess crude account.
The EFCC official said that N84.7 billion was paid to Akindele’s company through First Bank Plc and then shared among various parties, including Yari and Idris.
“Before this payment was made, there was no contract agreement between Akindele Olusegun and Co. Ltd and any government agency. There was no evidence of any service rendered by this company to warrant this payment,” the official said.
“the balance on the account was N451, 631 and the source of the payment was from FAAC’s Escrow account. Investigation revealed that this account was under the control of the 1st defendant (Idris) and the 3rd defendant (Usman) who was the director of the federation account in the office of the AGF.
“Aside from this payment on February 12, 2021, my lord, similar payment of the same amount of over N21 billion were made on May 6, July 28 and November 5, 2021, bringing it to a total of about N84.39 billion.”
