By Tabora Bojang
UDP leader Ousainu Darboe has maintained that government was not transparent about ‘attempts to secretly lift crude oil from Nigeria’.
Darboe first made this accusation at a political rally recently but his statement was met with a strongly worded rebuttal issued by the Government debunking it as “fatally false, malicious and without a scintilla of truth.”
But speaking to the West Coast Radio yesterday, Darboe claimed the deal only failed to materialise because there were elements in The Gambia who are blocking it because they want the deal to be very transparent.
He said these people would on several occasions cite technical problems to their Nigerian counterparts whenever the deal was about to kick off between the government and a Nigerian company called Savannah.
“They cannot deny it. In the first place, what I said was that the Government was rather not transparent. They have accepted that there were at least some talks over the crude oil. Why was that not made known to the Gambian people? Their [government’s] trivial argument that I was foreign minister and vice president shows how bankrupt they are of the truth. Those kinds of shady things will always be kept in the dark and Mr Darboe will never know anything about those things. In fact, as foreign minister and vice president, I did not have anything to do with trade matters.”
He continued: “I am happy that when they tried to debunk what I said, they never said anything about the D35 million [FABB saga] which I said was money laundering. And also, are they about to accept what I said that the fleet of cars that President Adama Barrow imported in his name were monies acquired from corrupt practice, because they never address that? This [crude oil] is real. We have our connections and we know the things going on about crude oil. In fact, I have told President Barrow that whenever things are discussed in his cabinet, I know it whenever I want,” Darboe said.
