EFCC raids Maiduguri flour mills company, arrests 4 officials

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) in Maiduguri, Borno state, on Friday raided the premises of Maiduguri Flour Mills where they arrested top staff of the company.

Maiduguri Flour Mills is one of the oldest food processing companies belonging to the Borno state government.

Witnesses said the officials arrived the Kumshe area location of Flour Mill at about 2 p.m. in the company of armed policemen who surrounded the premises.

The EFCC personnel reportedly drove into the premises and asked for the Managing Director of the company, Ma’aji Arfo, who was not available as at the time of the raid.

The personnel were said to have spent about an hour conducting searches on some of the key management offices during which they retrieved large volumes of documents and then left with four top management staff of the company including the Director of Finance.

PREMIUM TIMES gathered that the raid was prompted by a petition written by some unknown members of the state alleging financial misappropriation by the management of the company.

Those arrested comprised Mohammed Usman, Abba Kyari, Kailan Goni and Abdulfatai Abdulrahim

The EFCC Zonal Head of Operations in Maiduguri, Mr. Aminu Ado, confirmed the raid to PREMIUM TIMES during an interview in his office.

He said the arrest became necessary following the failure of the management of the company to, ”cooperate in an ongoing investigation of the company.”

“The Commission had in August last year received a petition involving the Maiduguri Flour Mills of which the case has been on since then”, Mr Ado said.

“The case could not be concluded following lack of cooperation on the side of management of the company.

“When we say lack of cooperation, I mean the management has not been forthcoming with information which we requested from them. After all the promises they made to furnish us with information we requested, they failed to respond as we requested from them.

“In view of that, we have to make sure that we get the information from them through lawful means. So the only option we have after exhausting the various means of getting them to provide the information was to go there and source the information we needed in order for us to conclude the investigation.

“That was why our personnel visited the Maiduguri Flour Mills.

“In doing that, we had to conduct searches of the premises and recovered some information documents and also arrested some of the personnel of the management.

“The media will henceforth be briefed on the investigation that has now commenced in earnest.’,” he said.

He said Section 38 of the Act that established EFCC empowers its personnel to carry out such raid “if we request information that the person in question fails to oblige”.

“In this case, we have written to them since August 2017 when we received a petition against them; and they wrote to us in reply that they have received our letter and promised to revert. But since then, they failed to get back to us.

“We wonder how somebody or an organization will take over five months to reply a simple request. That was when we began to suspect that something fishy is going on there. So we had to give them a surprise visit today.

PREMIUM TIMES gathered that the Friday raid by EFCC was carried out barely two weeks after the commission had affected the transfer of some of the top management staff in Maiduguri Zonal office.