TheCable

Rebirth Nigeria Leadership and Good Governance Initiative, a pro-democracy group, has raised questions over  the income declaration made by the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar.

The PDP presidential candidate had declared N60.2 million as his income over a three-year period.

Addressing journalists in Abuja on Sunday, Olugbenro Ogunoye,  national president of the group, said the remittance is filled with irregularities and needs to be probed.

He said the former vice-president is worth more than and trying to deceive Nigerians or to help him avoid paying the right taxes to the government

“The amount of money the PDP presidential candidate doles out to his supporters, even before the start of electioneering, on a monthly basis is way more than N20 million,” he said.

“We do not want to go into the details of the dollar rain he made to fall at the convention that produced him as PDP’s candidate. Is he trying to tell us that he gave out the equivalent of his one year income to three delegates? He must have been working for ten thousand years to pull that feat.

“Alhaji Atiku Abubakar’s worth had been estimated at about $1.4 billion while his loyalists had touted his business acumen citing investments in media, shipping, education, manufacturing and other areas. If these businesses, in addition to his pension as a former vice president, cannot lift his annual earnings above N20 million then something is cardinally wrong with his business sense. Either the books are being cooked up to project losses and avoid paying the correct taxes or he is in reality a bad and lousy businessman that should not be allowed anywhere near the economy.

“The myth of Atiku Abubakar being a business maverick has thus been forever shattered because even those running enterprises that are a tenth of his business empire earn more than N20 million annually as personal income and their businesses are not suffering.”