“If Britain is genuinely committed to anti-corruption the acid test for David Cameron is to meet the aspirations of all Nigerians as demanded by President Buhari and return all looted Nigeria’s funds kept in UK, ” Aremu said.
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Cameron had been caught on camera telling Queen Elizabeth II that Nigeria and Afghanistan are fantastically corrupt and possibly two of the most corrupt countries in the world.
Corruption is a bigger threat to the world than terrorist extremists, U.S. secretary of state John Kerry said at a UK-hosted summit seeking to tackle global graft.
Cameron, who has made battling financial wrongdoing a priority, said “corruption is the cancer at the heart of so many problems we need to tackle in our world”.
Asked ahead of the anti-corruption conference in London if Nigeria was “fantastically corrupt”, President Buhari, who came to power a year ago on a promise to fight corruption, replied: “Yes”.
Nigeria said last week that an estimated $15 billion (€13.1 billion) had been stolen from the Nigerian people through corrupt arms contracts under the previous government and Mr Buhari said corruption was also endemic in the country’s oil sector.
“What would I do with an apology?”
The official announcement by the British government says the summit will bring “together a unique coalition of governments, businesses, civil society, law enforcement, sports committees and worldwide organizations to step up global action to expose, punish and drive out corruption wherever it exists”.
Some Nigerians interviewed on the matter in Abuja agreed that corruption was a major problem confronting the rapid development of the country and should be condemned.
The prime minister adds that if United Kingdom agencies believe that a property was bought with illicit wealth, the burden of proof could be reversed, with the owner required to show that legitimate funds were used in the purchase or else the assets would be seized.
A spokesman said that Buhari and Ghani “have been invited to the summit because they are driving the fight against corruption in their countries”.
Shehu had said that in making the remarks, the British Prime Minister must be looking at “an old snapshot of Nigeria”. “Today is just the start of a more co-ordinated, ambitious global effort to defeat corruption”.
The British Virgin Islands, a British overseas territory that the Panama Papers suggested was home to more than half of the 200,000 companies set up by Mossack Fonseca, was not represented at the London summit.
Afghanistan is at number 166, second-from-bottom, in Transparency International’s latest Corruption Perceptions Index, an annual ranking of countries.
But the most corrupt country of all was Somalia, where DFID plans to spend £82.7 million this year.
A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson on Wednesday declined to criticise the queen’s comments, although they were blacked out of a BBC World broadcast report in China.
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DFID does not hand money directly to national governments in the most corrupt countries.
