FURTHER investigations into the activities of financial irregularities during the government of former president Dr Goodluck Jonathan have revealed that his media aide Dr Doyin Okupe was paid N1.6bn which he used to hack into unfriendly websites.
Over recent weeks, former national security adviser Col Sambo Dasuki has been the subject of a $2.1bn arms scandal during which it was alleged that his office was used to siphon money budgeted for military purposes to private accounts. Investigators say that two companies linked to Dr Okupe received N1.6bn (£5.5m) of the cash, in three shady cyber security contracts.
One of the contracts had instructions to hunt down unfriendly media websites and mount distributed denial of service attacks upon them. Apparently the project involved shutting down online media platforms perceived as friendly to President Muhammadu Buhari or critical of Dr Jonathan in the run-up to the 2015 elections.
Dr Okupe also awarded a contract to intercept all optic fibre cables landing in Nigeria, while a third one involved a passive mass and target GSM interception that had the ability to decrypt ciphers and operate undetected. So far, Dr Okupe, a former senior special assistant on public affairs to the then President Jonathan, has evaded scrutiny in the ongoing arms scandal.
It is believed that the three contracts awarded to the companies linked with Dr Okupe were handed out without any prioritisation of efficiency or due process with regards evaluating value for money. Rather, there was a pattern of the hurried release of cash and in one instance, the full contract sum was paid before the delivery of products, which insiders claim was not even delivered.
According to investigators, with the three contracts, Col Dasuki paid more than double the actual amounts of items purchased and relied on a single source when he should have opened up the contract to competitive bidding. On June 13, 2014, in the heat of the 2015 presidential elections campaigns, Romix Technologies, registered as an offshore and anonymous company in Cyprus, received N398m ($2m) from the Office of the National Security Adviser in Nigeria.
Apparently, this was part payment for a cyber contract that would later cost Nigeria $2.6m, with the initial payment wired to Romix Technologies' bank account held with Luemi Private Bank in Zurich, Switzerland in June 2014. Internet security experts estimate that the amount paid for these hacking services was at least 250% higher than the actual market value.
Romix Technologies in Cyprus has its ownership anonymized, a practice allowed in Cyprus and few other countries that enable investors set up and run shell companies. The company shares its first name and financial ties with Romix Soilfix Nigeria, owned by Dr Okupe and Ilan Salman, an Israeli who has worked in Nigeria for close to 20 years.
However, Dr Okupe denies any links with the company although Mr Salman, does not. Investigations traced several financial transactions between the company and its Nigerian version, Soilfix Nigeria as far back as 2012 when Dr Okupe was still an active member of the board at Romix in Nigeria.
