The operatives of the Uyo Zonal Office of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, have arrested 3-man gang in Uyo the Akwa Ibom State Capital, for allegedly impersonating operatives of both the EFCC and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, (ICPC). The arrested suspects are Norbert Rampa, 51; Patrick Essien, 50; and Gabriel Daniel, 32.
According to the statement released by EFCC on the 3-man gang, Mr Rampa, Essien and Daniel, along with other members of their team had paid a courtesy visit to the Commissions office in Uyo, on September 19, 2018, under the Grassroot Development Advocacy Initiative (GDAI) which they claim was a registered organisation, under the auspices of National Anti-corruption Coalition (NACC).
During that visit, their National Director, Essien, spoke extensively on the several training that their members had gone through to ensure grassroots engagements in budget processes, aimed at sustaining the fight against corruption. Rampa who introduced himself as the Director of programmes emphasised on their ‘robust’ collaboration with the ICPC, with an unsettling request that they are granted operational powers, to which the zonal head refused and advised them to report all perceived corrupt practices to the Commission.
But the team paid no heed to that advice as some of its top-ranking members embarked on various levels of forgery and impersonation to facilitate their criminal activities which must have been going on for years under the guise of ‘Grassroot Initiative’.
The modus operandi of this 3-man gang is purely hinged on intimidation of innocent persons and extortion of same under the pretext that they were in an operational joint tax force of both the EFCC and the ICPC.
But they ran out of luck when they picked on one Aloysius Udobong, an elderly retiree for their game of intimidation and extortion.