Press Release.
\nBy Ikechukwu Eze,\u00a0Media Adviser to Dr. Goodluck Jonathan
\nRe: Claims that Ex-President Jonathan received $200m payment from OPL 245 deal.
\nThe allegations that former President Goodluck Jonathan received $200\u00a0million as proceeds from the Malabu Oil deal which were published on a\u00a0gossip news site, Buzzfeed, and republished by a few other newspapers,\u00a0is false in its entirety, and is one more in the series of fake news\u00a0sponsored by those threatened by Dr. Jonathan’s continuously rising\u00a0profile in the international community.
\nCommon sense should have shown the purveyors of this slander that the\u00a0Malabu oil deal far predated the Jonathan regime and it would only\u00a0make sense for him to be bribed if he had a time machine to go back in\u00a0time to when the deal was struck.
\nThe report relied on hearsay evidence from a man of questionable\u00a0character who provided no substance to back up his false claim.
\nThe man quoted by the report said he ‘assumed’ that Dr. Jonathan would\u00a0be bribed. Since when has the assumption of a crook been enough to\u00a0smear the reputation of a patriot and international statesman like Dr.\u00a0Goodluck Jonathan?
\nThe report also wrongly claimed that \u201cJonathan and Etete had known\u00a0each other for years, according to Shell staff, when Jonathan served\u00a0as a tutor to Etete\u2019s children while he was a minister.\u201d This claim is\u00a0clearly ridiculous and nothing can be further from the truth.
\nIn the first place, the former President couldn\u2019t have been a \u2018tutor\u2019\u00a0to Etete\u2019s children without first establishing contact with the\u00a0family. This is because Jonathan met Etete who served as the Petroleum\u00a0Minister in Gen. Abacha\u2019s military regime for the first time under the\u00a0succeeding civilian administration, when he was already the Deputy\u00a0Governor of Bayelsa State. Even then, the fact remains that\u00a0ex-President Jonathan has never met any of Etete\u2019s children.
\nBesides, Jonathan couldn\u2019t have been anybody\u2019s private tutor during\u00a0that period, because he was already in the directorate cadre in Oil\u00a0Mineral Producing Areas Development Commission, OMPADEC (now NDDC),\u00a0having already left the academia, at the time Etete was a serving\u00a0minister.
\nThis story, coming so soon after the fake news that Dr. Goodluck\u00a0Jonathan refused British help in rescuing the Chibok Girls (a story\u00a0that the British Government debunked) and that he plans to contest the\u00a02019 elections (another lie), proves that these fallacious stories are\u00a0deliberately contrived for reasons that are yet to be publicly\u00a0disclosed.
\n
\nIt is instructive that this same old fable apparently intended to\u00a0rubbish Jonathan\u2019s name locally and internationally, is being recycled\u00a0with more lies added to garnish the narrative, at a time the\u00a0ex-President is making efforts to resolve the issues in the Peoples\u00a0Democratic Party (PDP).
\nAgain, let us point out for clarity and for the umpteenth time that\u00a0while he was in office and now that he is out of office, former\u00a0President Jonathan did not open and does not own any bank account,\u00a0aircraft or real estate outside Nigeria. Anyone with contrary\u00a0information is challenged to publicly publish same.
\nFinally, Dr. Jonathan appeals to the media to report facts rather than\u00a0innuendo and gossip. He asks that the media ought to remember that he\u00a0signed the Freedom of Information Act into law and it is only fair to\u00a0use it to investigate allegations and establish the truth.
\nDr. Jonathan cannot stop criminals from ‘assuming’, but he can and he\u00a0will stop them from getting away with blatant lies.
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Press Release. By Ikechukwu Eze,\u00a0Media Adviser to Dr. Goodluck Jonathan Re: Claims that Ex-President Jonathan received $200m payment from OPL 245 deal. The allegations that former President Goodluck Jonathan received $200\u00a0million as proceeds from the Malabu Oil deal which were published on a\u00a0gossip news site, Buzzfeed, and republished by a few other newspapers,\u00a0is false in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":693,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37822\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}