Senator Joshua Dariye, the recently convicted former Governor of Plateau State, who is serving 14 years jail term at Kuje prisons has reportedly purchased APC nomination form from prison.
According to reports, Joshua Dariye’s personal assistant, Itauna Dinka, obtained the nomination form for Dariye’s re-election on Friday, September 7.
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The senator was on 12 June sentenced to 16 years in prison by a Federal High Court sitting in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital.
Justice Adebukola Banjoko, who gave the ruling, held that the former governor would serve a two-year and 14-year jail terms concurrently but did not give him an option of a fine.
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission charged Dariye with money laundering in 2007. He was accused of diverting N1.126bn from the Plateau government’s ecological funds through an account, Ebenezer Reitner Ventures, an unregistered company, he operated.
The punishments imposed on the ex-governor for the two categories of offences of criminal breach of trust and criminal misappropriation are the maximum as provided under sections 315 and 309 of the Penal Code Act, respectively.
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The judge threw out eight of the 23 charges on the grounds of either duplicity or lack of sufficient evidence.
Economic and Financial Crimes Commission’s lawyer, Mr. Rotimi Jacobs (SAN), had in opposing the defence lawyer’s plea for mercy, urged the court to impose the maximum sentence to serve as deterrence to others.
In her ruling, the judge said:
“I can’t imagine such a brazen act. Is it the transfer of as much as about half a billion naira from the state’s Ecological Fund into a personal venture account? Everybody is a victim here,” the judge said.
She said from a random check of some documents tendered as exhibits, she discovered that “the defendant was, in fact, richer than his state.”
She added,
“This is a trauma of the trial; and there should be no compromise to corruption, by whatever shade or colour, or region, rich or poor; corruption will forever be corruption.
“Every case is different on its own, and I have no personal animosity, I’m just doing my job the way I know how to, and not only the Ecological Funds were misappropriated, but funds from the Plateau State government.”
The judgment, which came at the end of about 10-year trial, saw over eight years of delay caused by the trip Dariye’s appeals attacking the validity and the competence of the charges took from the trial court to the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court even as he lost all the way.
It also came over 13 years after Dariye was said to have jumped bail in London, the United Kingdom, where he was investigated for alleged crimes including money laundering.
