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N700m Fraud: CSO Urges Edo Voters to Reject Ize-Iyamu Over Criminal Trial

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…Charges Buhari, EFCC Chair, Umar to Keep Watch against Undue Interference

An Edo-based civil society group, Forum for Progressive Governance and Accountability (Forum4PGA), has called on Edo people to reject Pastor Osagie Ize-Iyamu, candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the September 19, 2020 gubernatorial poll in the state, as he faces a criminal charge bordering on an alleged N700 million fraud case preferred against him by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).

The EFCC had in the case with suit No. FHC/BE21C/ 2016 before Justice J. M. Umar at the Federal High Court, Benin City, filed an eight-count charge against Ize-Iyamu and four others on alleged illegal receipt of public funds to the tune of N700 million for the purpose of conducting the 2015 general elections, contrary to the provisions of the EFCC Act and the Money Laundering (Prohibition) Act.

Torrent of criticisms have continued to trail the ongoing corruption trial of the APC candidate with several groups calling on Ize-Iyamu to step aside from the guber race and clear his name.

In a statement jointly signed by the Secretary, Forum4PGA, Festus Eghosa and the Vice President,  Jerome Ohien Destiny, the group noted that it was imperative  to put Edo electorates and all right-thinking members of the public on the alert because of the  negative implications and threat Pastor Ize-Iyamu’s candidacy poses to the integrity of all Edo people and electoral process.

The group further called on President Muhammadu Buhari, Acting Chairman of the EFCC, Mohammed Umar and other well-meaning Nigerians to watch out against undue interference in the case, noting that some powers behind the scene were working assiduously to influence the trial and sabotage the court proceeding in favour of the lead defendant, Pastor Ize-Iyamu.

The statement noted: “How can the APC produce a candidate being prosecuted for a criminal act in a state known for high prestige, integrity and dignity? This is an insult to the sensibility of all Edo sons and daughters both at home and in the Diaspora. We must all come out on September 19 to tell Pastor Ize-Iyamu that Edo people are not fools.

“Edo people will vote and support only individuals with noble character that are above board and have no verifiable allegations of corruption and malfeasance like Governor Godwin Obaseki, whose achievements in the last three years and seven months have repositioned the state to compete favourably with other sub-nationals. We will not allow a known looter put our state on reverse.”

The group further said: “We know President Buhari is a man of impeccable character and integrity who is determined to rid the country of looters. We are aware that some persons who were tried over a similar case of money laundering stemming from the 2015 election campaign sleaze popularly known as DasukiGate have been jailed.

“The DasukiGate and the attendant criminal convictions as well as the billions of returned loot remain some of the president’s landmark achievements in the fight against corruption and we’re confident that he won’t relent in his anti-corruption fight. We call on the new Acting Chairman of the EFCC, Mohammed Umar, to watch out against undue interference in the case and ensure that all those found wanting before the law are made to face the consequences of their actions

   

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The Missing Middle of Infrastructure Finance: Why Capital Still Fails to Become Infrastructure

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  By Chidi Nwafor  In October 2023, a Gulf sovereign wealth fund quietly closed a $2 billion allocation to global infrastructure, earmarked in part for emerging-market energy and transport assets. The announcement drew the usual applause: another sign, commentators said, that institutional capital was finally waking up to the infrastructure opportunity in the Global South. Eighteen months later, less than a tenth of that allocation had actually left the fund’s balance sheet. Not because the mandate had changed. Not because the fund had lost appetite. According to two people familiar with the portfolio, the constraint was simpler and more uncomfortable: there were not enough investable projects to put the money into. This is not a story about a reluctant investor. It is a story about capital that wants to move, cannot find enough places willing and able to receive it in a form it can underwrite, and quietly waits instead. Multiply that fund by the hundreds of pension schemes, sovereign wealth vehicles, commercial banks and infrastructure funds now carrying dedicated allocations for emerging-market infrastructure, and a pattern emerges that rarely makes it into a headline: the world is not short of capital for infrastructure. It has capital in historic abundance, sitting adjacent to a historic infrastructure gap, unable to cross the distance between the two. The Comfortable Explanation  The explanation on offer at every major infrastructure summit is a familiar one. Global infrastructure investment needs run into the tens of trillions of dollars over the coming decade; committed capital falls well short; therefore, the problem is one of insufficient funding, and the solution is more of it: more pledges, more blended-finance facilities, more climate funds, more multilateral capital increases. It is a comfortable explanation because it assigns responsibility clearly to governments who under-fund, institutions who under-commit, and it offers a clean remedy: raise more. It is also, on close inspection, not what the evidence shows. Pension funds globally hold trillions in assets under management with explicit infrastructure allocations that remain structurally underweight, not because trustees have rejected the asset class but because deal flow meeting their risk and governance thresholds has not materialised at the pace their mandates assume. Sovereign wealth funds report the same pattern. Commercial banks with dedicated project finance desks describe pipelines that look full at the term-sheet stage and thin dramatically by financial close. Development finance institutions, whose entire purpose is to absorb risk that commercial capital will not, routinely report that their binding constraint is not capital adequacy but the volume of bankable transactions their teams can originate and structure in a given year. None of this fits the scarcity narrative. All of it fits a different one. Availability Is Not Deployability  Capital availability and capital deployability are not the same condition, and the conflation of the two is doing real damage to how the world thinks about the infrastructure gap. Availability asks whether money exists somewhere with a mandate that could, in principle, be pointed at infrastructure. Deployability asks something much narrower and much harder: whether a specific project, at a specific moment, has been engineered, structured, documented and de-risked to the point where an investment committee can approve it without exception. The first condition is met, overwhelmingly, across nearly every category of capital that matters to infrastructure. The second is met by only a small fraction of the projects competing for it. The result is a market that looks, from the outside, like a financing gap, and functions, from the inside, like a conversion problem: an abundance of capital on one side, an abundance of infrastructure need on the other, and an underbuilt set of mechanisms in between capable of turning one into the other at any meaningful scale. Where the Conversion Breaks  The break does not happen at the ends of the process. It happens in the middle, in the unglamorous sequence of work that turns a plausible concept into an instrument a fiduciary can sign. A promising transmission project needs a feasibility study rigorous enough to survive institutional scrutiny rather than optimistic enough to attract early interest. It needs offtake arrangements that hold up under real counterparty and currency risk, not the counterparty risk assumed in a base case. It needs environmental and social documentation calibrated to the standards of the institutions being asked to fund it, not the standards of the jurisdiction hosting it. It needs a legal and commercial structure that allocates risk in ways a commercial lender, not only a development financier, will accept. It needs a sponsor capable of executing what has been proposed, not merely capable of proposing it. Each of these is ordinary project finance discipline. None of it is exotic, and in mature infrastructure markets it happens as a matter of course, absorbed into systems built over decades: specialist advisers, standard-form contracts, established procurement norms, deep pools of transaction expertise. What is missing in the markets where the infrastructure gap is largest is not the standard itself but the machinery that meets it. Projects arrive at investment committees with ambition intact and preparation incomplete, and that gap is treated, again and again, as an individual project’s failure rather than what it actually is: a structural absence in the systems responsible for producing investable transactions at scale. The Missing Middle  This is the Missing Middle of Infrastructure Finance: the institutional architecture that sits between capital that wants to move and infrastructure that needs building, and whose incompleteness explains far more of the global infrastructure gap than any shortfall in committed funds. It consists of project preparation facilities able to fund feasibility and structuring work before commercial viability has been proven. Transaction advisers capable of building deals that satisfy development mandates and commercial return thresholds at once, rather than treating the two as separate constituencies to be managed sequentially. Risk-sharing and guarantee instruments that convert political, regulatory and currency risk into something a commercial balance sheet can underwrite. Aggregation platforms that bundle smaller, individually sub-scale projects into portfolios large enough to justify institutional transaction costs. Standardised documentation that reduces the bespoke legal cost of every new deal. And coordination across ministries, regulators and financiers robust enough that a technically sound project does not die in bureaucratic sequencing after the money has already been found. None of these are new ideas in isolation. What is missing is their assembly into a coherent system, deliberately funded and institutionally accountable, rather than scattered across donor-funded pilots that end when the grant does. The African Dimension  Africa makes this dynamic unusually visible, and consequently offers an unusually clear opportunity to correct it. The continent’s infrastructure financing need, by any measure, is vast. Less understood is that the shortfall is disproportionately one of preparation rather than capital. Nigerian gas-to-power, off-grid solar and mini-grid developers have each demonstrated that individual projects can clear the bankability bar; what has not emerged is systemic pipeline scale, a steady stream of comparably prepared projects large enough to absorb the capital already circling the sector. The pattern repeats, with local variation, from grid infrastructure in East Africa to transport corridors in West Africa. Interested capital is rarely the scarce input. Investment-ready projects are. The Global Comparison  Mature markets solved this problem gradually and mostly invisibly, through decades of institution-building that predates the current infrastructure conversation: specialist project finance units inside banks, standardised PPP frameworks, established regulatory playbooks, deep benches of transaction lawyers and engineers who move between deals rather than between one-off assignments. Emerging and frontier markets are not being asked to meet a lower standard. They are being asked to meet the same standard without having built the same machinery, and then being told, when deals fail to close, that the problem is insufficient funding….
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Union Bank, AIICO Multishield, Checkers Custard, Others Back 5th Cycling Lagos

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Union Bank of Nigeria Plc, AIICO Multishield, Checkers Custard and other corporate organisations have thrown their weight behind the 5th Cycling Lagos,…
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