Onyeama: We didn’t know US was monitoring Jonathan’s men

Geoffrey Onyeama, minister of foreign affairs, says the government did not know that the US was listening to the telephone conversations of members of the Jonathan administration on some “suspicious” investments made in the country.

In July, an indicting telephone conversation between Diezani Alison-Madueke, former minister petroleum resources, and her associates – Kola Aluko and Jide Omokore – was leaked.

Alison-Madueke was heard chiding Aluko for being too extravagant and showy, warning that he was attracting attention and scrutiny.

The US government had seized some pieces of property linked to Alison-Madueke and her associates in the country.

Speaking with state house correspondents in Abuja on Wednesday, Onyeama said the government was making effort to recover stolen funds stashed away abroad.

Asked to put a figure to how much has been stolen from the country, he said: “On the issue of how much is stolen from the country, it’s an ongoing thing, we have been discovering all the time because you see the sophistication that there is today in hiding money around the world is amazing, even western countries themselves have a lot of problems and it takes them a lot of time and they discovered about the Panama papers, nobody knew about all those funds illegally stashed until you suddenly have the revelations under the Panama papers. So it’s really an ongoing thing and then new ones coming up all the time.

“As you saw recently we never knew about the US eavesdropping on some telephone conversations of members of the previous government and private sectors talking about investments that were made in the United States, it just suddenly came out like that, so it’s an ongoing thing.”