The Pension Reform Task Force Team said it recovered a total of N221bn pension funds stolen by some operators of the old pension scheme in 2012.
The funds were part of the money set aside by the Federal Government to finance the payment of pensions of its retirees before the advent of the Contributory Pension Scheme.
The PRTT also said it confiscated 281 properties located in choice areas from indicted officials of the various Federal Government pension offices last year.
The Information and Media Relations Officer, PRTT, Mr. Hassan Salihu, who spoke with our correspondent on Thursday, said the team made efforts to sanitise the old pension system during the period.
“Our recovery from pension thieves last year was about N221bn. Some of the recoveries were evidence of what government should have expended on pension. Properties were also recovered,” he said.
Because the looting had persisted for many years, Salihu said the PRTT could not produce the total figure of money that had been stolen from the government.
According to him, before the PRTT blocked the loopholes through which the scams were been perpetrated, officials of the pension departments were stealing about N300m on a daily basis.
He said the PRTT arrested many of the suspects, confiscated their properties and discovered huge amounts of stolen cash in their apartments following series of searches, adding that those indicted had been charged to court.
The Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, had said N74bn of the recovered pension funds was mopped up to finance the budget.
The PRTT, led by Mr. Abdulrasheed Maina, also said it discovered over 73,000 ghost pension accounts, which were illegally opened by government officials from two pension departments in the period under consideration.
Salihu said the team deleted those accounts and saved several billions of naira from being stolen.
By this, he said, the PRTT was able to block several loopholes through which officials were siphoning money from the country and deprived the genuine pensioners from getting their monthly pensions.
“The PRTT traced and cracked down pension cartels in the entire country, stopped stealing of billions of naira monthly by pension robbers, disallowed further stealing and deleted over 73,000 fake pensioners' accounts in just two pension offices,” he said.
The National Union of Pensioners had in a memorandum to the Senate Committee on Establishment on Public Service Matters and Management of Pension Funds, complained that more ghost pensioners were being paid their monthly stipends, while the genuine pensioners were removed from payrolls.
According to it, since 2002, the names of many pensioners have been omitted from the pension payrolls and all efforts to place such names on the lists have proved abortive.
The union said the office of the Head of Civil Service of the Federation saddled with the payment of pensions of federal pensioners and state pensioners with federal shares, was responsible for the bulk of the problems being faced by pensioners in the country.
