The Managing Director of the Nigeria Port Authority (NPA) Mohammed Bello Koko, has said he will not succumb to the antics of individuals hiding under the cloak of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and using a section of online media to blackmail him.
The NPA MD said individuals having failed in their desperation to dent his image nor extort him, have resorted to cruel campaigns of calumny against his person and family.
Koko stated this in a statement he personally signed and made available to Blueprint on Saturday.
He warned that he will institute legal action against any media house that publishes unsubstantiated and damaging reports about my person.
According to him, this latest series of sponsored blackmails began in 2021 immediately he was elevated from the position of Executive Director of Finance and Administration to the position of Managing Director of the NPA.
The NPA boss also berated his ‘blackmailers’ for asking the UK government to cancel his visa and seize his assets and that of his wife in the UK.
He disclosed that the UK property they mischievously mentioned was declared with the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) and purchased before he was appointed into public office.
He said: “It is also important to note that the property was purchased on a 15-year mortgage payment plan.
“Resorting to writing to the UK Government, seeking visa cancellation and forfeiture of assets belonging to my wife and I, is not only malicious but also cruel and wicked. I have yet to understand why these evil machinations would be orchestrated against me. Is the offence that I committed my acceptance and readiness to serve my country to the best of my ability?
“In deceit, they have disingenuously claimed in the sponsored report that UK/Ireland Investigators were the ones that had written to the UK government after they had purportedly unearthed alleged criminal acts against me, bordering on money laundering activities, fraud, forgery, and tax evasion, which are all baseless figments of their malicious intent.
“If the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission had been on the matter as indicated in the report, it is then unfair to suggest or claim that some questionable UK/Ireland Investigators are now pushing for an exclusion order to ban me from ever entering the United Kingdom. One expects that there should be inter-agency collaboration in line with some bilateral or mutual agreements.
Continuing he said: “I had, on several occasions, stated that the NPA under my leadership is not aware of any secret foreign accounts and I could not have been a beneficiary of something that I am not aware of and, which I would like to emphasize is non – existent to the best of my knowledge.”
He said as NPA MD, he runs an open administration that gives premium to due process in the execution of the agency’s core mandates.
“For the record, the NPA on my watch has specifically, in terms of tangible achievements that the various publics can relate with, recorded some modest achievements.
“The NPA has generated the sum of N286 billion and remitted over N100 billion to Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF) account of the federation as of November 2022,” he said.
