The Director General of Securities and Exchange Commission ( SEC), Lamido Yuguda , was queried on Tuesday  by the Senate’s joint committee on Finance and National Planning on false N10billion spent on salaries of less than 600 staffs of the agency on yearly basis .

The Committee led by  Senator Olamilekan Adeola ( APC Lagos West), ordered the agency to immediately remit N300million into the Consolidated revenue fund ( CRF), on or before Thursday next week .

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Trouble started when DG SEC, in his submission before the committee on revenue projections for the 2021 budget , said out of N4billion revenue generated by SEC in 2019, only N86.835million was remitted into the CRF  .

Pissed  by the wide gap between revenue generated and remittance made , Senator Adeola sought for clarifications from the Accountant General of the Federation ( AGF ) , Ahmed Idris , on the performance index of SEC.

The AGF in his response said ,the N86.835million remitted into CRF by SEC in 2019 from the N4billion revenue generated , was outrageously low .

” The least of such remittance expected from SEC from N4billion revenue is N846million , meaning that the agency is owing the federal government N760million “, he said .

Angered by the disclosure made by the AGF, the committee members took up the SEC Boss on why whopping N10billion is being expended on salaries of less than 600 staffers of the agency on yearly basis .

According to Senator Adeola , the N10billion when spread on 600 staffers , shows that each of the staff of the agency collects N15.7million per annum .

” This is unacceptable for a country seriously looking for more revenues internally to fund it’s budget “, he said .

But the DG  of SEC in his response , said he met the agency as a ‘top heavy Organization ‘ , which according to him , very difficult to give critical review with the required urgency .

Consequently , the committee resolved that since SEC as a self financing agency got N1.7billion budgetary allocation from the federal government in 2019 but  generated N3.7billion as revenue , it can be excluded from yearly budgetary allocations .

Though the DG first pleaded that such exclusion should be restricted to recurrent expenditure component of the yearly budget but later agreed with the committee members that it should also be exited from capital votes .