When Abdulrasheed Maina was appointed to lead Nigeria’s Presidential Task Force on Pension Reforms, he was entrusted with one of the most sensitive mandates in public service: safeguarding the retirement savings of millions of Nigerians. The task force was created to clean up decades of fraud in the pension system, modernize verification processes, and ensure that public funds meant for elderly retirees actually reached their intended beneficiaries. Instead, Maina’s tenure became synonymous with one of Nigeria’s most notorious corruption scandals-one that continues to reverberate years after his conviction.

New reporting has now added another layer to that story. Investigations by journalists from OCCRP, Premium Times, and the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAAF) have uncovered at least four foreign properties that Maina purchased in the United States and the United Arab Emirates, at a time when Nigerian courts later found he was laundering public pension funds. These assets, bought outright with no mortgage-“cash in hand,” according to property records-appear to have escaped seizure by Nigerian authorities, even as dozens of properties linked to Maina inside Nigeria were confiscated.

Maina chaired the Presidential Task Force on Pension Reforms between 2010 and 2013, a period marked by promises of transparency and technological reform. The task force was meant to introduce biometric enrollment systems to weed out “ghost pensioners” and halt the siphoning of funds. Prosecutors now allege that Maina used this very reform agenda as a cover for fraud, awarding sham contracts for biometric equipment and services to companies he secretly controlled.

According to court filings, these contracts allowed large sums of pension money to be diverted under the guise of official allowances and enrollment expenses. In one ongoing case, prosecutors allege that Maina dishonestly received 700 million naira-worth about $4.5 million at the time-through fake biometric enrollment contracts. That trial is still underway.

In a separate case, Maina was convicted in 2021 of money laundering. The court found that he had laundered pension funds on a massive scale, receiving more than 2 billion naira (nearly $5 million in 2021 terms) that bore no relation to his lawful income as a civil servant. Federal High Court judge Okon Abang underscored this disparity at sentencing,........

© Blitz