One of the hottest stories making waves in Abuja recently is the arrest of Ms. Jamila Tangaza, former Senior Special Assistant on Media and Information to Sen. Bala Mohammed, former Minister of Federal Capital Territory by operatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
Our sources at EFCC disclosed to us why she was arrested: “As for Ms Jamila Tangaza, we arrested and detained her because she was connected with the land scam and abuse of office. The ex-minister asked her to resign her appointment with BBC and appointed her as a Senior Special Assistant on Media and Information. But Bala allocated some plots of land to her to sell in order to acquire a mansion in Asokoro District too. Her house was allegedly worth N158million.”
“Also, Jamila allegedly abused her office by awarding N800million contracts to her company which is called Songbird Multimedia. Her case was interesting. When she registered the company with the Corporate Affairs Commission, she used a fictitious name as the CEO of the company but she is the sole signatory to the company’s account and her phone number is the point of contact with the firm.”
“We have sent her signature on CAC document and other specimen signatures collected from her to a forensic laboratory. Following a court order, we detained her in the past few days but as at Friday, she was pleading that we should grant her bail. We are looking into her request. You can verify from her what transpired. From custody in EFCC, we went with her to her office to recover some documents.” “We used the EFCC bus but along the way, she begged us to park the bus away from the vicinity of AGIS where she is a director. She did not want her staff and others to notice that she was brought to the office by EFCC team. We obliged her request by parking outside AGIS. We also didn’t allow policemen in uniform to follow her to the office. We assigned plain-clothe operatives and even asked her if she wanted the only lady in our team to follow her so that Jamila can blend with the crowd in AGIS without anyone suspecting anything. She said all plain clothe operatives can follow her. We did not put her in handcuffs. This is the extent we went based on her request to protect her reputation and integrity.”