Secret Reporters No place to hide
“’ No matter how fast or far a lie travels, the truth will always catch up with it”
-Anonymous
Rebuttal: The Regional Centre For International Commercial Arbitration Lagos (RCICAL) wouldn’t have dignified this fallacious report with a response, but that would mean allowing misinformation and outright falsehood to hold sway.
An anonymous reportage posted on an online news site named SECRET REPORTERS, dated 20th August,2021, published a spurious report replete with innuendos and smacks of mischief, against the Centre and its Director, Hon. Wilfred Daniel Ikatari.
The publication reported that an official brand-new Mercedes Benz jeep bought in 2015, estimated to be worth $94,200, averagely 50million naira was approved for disposal and sold off to an individual for 500,000 (five hundred thousand naira only). Nothing could be more farther from the truth than this. since the year 2014[the year Hon. Ikatari assumed the mantle of leadership of the centre), there has never been ANY budgetary allocation to the centre for the purchase of a single vehicle, old or new. Neither has there ever been, all through 2015,2016,2017,2018 till date. The records are open for further scrutiny on the Government Integrated Financial Management System (GIFMIS) Platform.
Furthermore, the publication goes a notch lower to allege that the Centre spent another 26 million four hundred thousand naira for hiring generators and the refurbishment of guest house! How incredulous. The centre has NEVER had a guest house. Not in the past, not now, and certainly not in the foreseeable future. And secondly, the Centre has never had any cause to hire a generator set, as we have two very functional generators (a 133kva and a 250kva).
The disparaging publication further alleged that Hon.Ikatari breached some provisions of public procurement act in award of contracts and other sundry fictitious allegations. All these allegations, perhaps exists only in the imaginations of the publishers.
The Regional Centre For International Commercial Arbitration Lagos was recently given a clean bill of health for judicious deployment of resources by the Director of the Department of Public Account, the office of the clerk of the Senate, Mr Benard Uzeme Okoh with pictorial evidences.
The Regional centre under the leadership of Hon. Ikatari ,has always been forthright and aboveboard with allocations and our records are prim and proper and open to scrutiny at all times and would not be distracted by farcical allegations and misinformation to smear the good reputation we have built over the years.
