The fight against corruption and economic sabotage is receiving a further boost as the Corporate Affairs Commission, CAC, is to grant the Code of Conduct Bureau, CCB access to its database to enable it to carry out a seamless investigation of companies suspected to be engaged in suspicious or illicit activities.
CAC Registrar-General, Garba Abubakar who gave the commitment Friday when he received the CCB Chairman, Professor Muhammad Isah during a visit to the Commission said the time was ripe to explore more areas of collaboration particularly real-time.
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Abubakar believes that in view of CAC’s strategic collaboration with other anti-corruption agencies including the EFCC, ICPC, and INTERPOL among others, the Commission established a dedicated unit to expeditiously handle requests for information and other services in corruption-related investigations.
The Registrar-General adds that any member of the public could conduct what he called a first-level check on the status of any company on the CAC website via the public search window at no cost.
While also speaking on the introduction of Beneficial Ownership Disclosure or Person with Significant Control, Garba Abubakar revealed that the disclosure would soon be extended to open data format to enable investigators to extract information on any Company as well as query the database to among others detect whether a particular name had featured in different companies.
He also revealed that the Commission was working assiduously for integration with the National Identity Management Commission’s database to validate the identity of anyone applying to register a company in order to eliminate incidences of submitting cloned copies of means of identification to the CAC.
CCB Chairman, Professor Muhammad Isa expressed satisfaction with the support and cooperation the Bureau has received from the Registrar-General since his assumption of office. The CAC and CCB, he said had a lot to do in order to enhance the economic wellbeing of the country. He further noted with delight that Abubakar had ensured what he called the expeditious and effective treatment of all requests from the CCB.
(Editor: Terverr Tyav)
