A Federal High Court in Kaduna State has dismissed the bail application submitted by Bashir Saidu, the former chief of staff to Nasir El-Rufai, the state’s immediate past governor.
Saidu, who was also the El-Rufai administration’s Commissioner for Finance, was charged with ten counts relating to embezzlement, money laundering, and theft of Kaduna State Government monies.
After being taken into custody by the police on January 2, 2025, he was subsequently placed under detention in the state capital’s Kaduna Correctional Centre.
But after being read the allegations, the defendant entered a not-guilty plea when the case was brought before Justice Isa Aliyu on Tuesday.
According to some of the charges, Saidu sold $45 million in hard currency that belonged to the Kaduna State Government, which is equivalent to N18,450,000,000, at a heavily discounted rate of N410 per dollar rather than the parallel market rate of N498 per dollar. The government allegedly suffered a loss of N3.9 billion as a result of the sale.
The prosecution claims that the offence occurred in 2022, during the defendant’s tenure as the El-Rufai administration’s Commissioner of Finance.
According to the prosecution, Sa’idu violated Section 18 of the Money Laundering Prevention and Prohibition Act 2022 by allegedly laundering more than three billion naira disparity.
The prosecution’s lawyer, Professor Nasiru Aliyu, objected to the bail motion when the defendant’s attorney, M. I. Abubakar, informed the court that his client had been detained for 21 days and that the court needed to grant his bail. He maintained that the statute stipulated that the prosecution had seven days to respond to the bail request.
In his ruling, Justice Aliyu decided that the prosecution should be given the legal amount of time to present its defence against the bail request.
To hear the bail application, he postponed the case to January 23, 2025.
