“In the past two and a half years or three years of my service, I have asked them to dismiss over 40 staff on account of corruption and financial malpractice.”

The above disclosure was made by the EFCC Chairman, Ola Olukoyede, when he met with media executives and other journalists in Abuja, yesterday.

“More than five of them are being prosecuted at the moment. You can follow those cases in court; they are public knowledge,”said Olukoyede..

He stressed that the laid off staff is part of the efforts to ensure that personnel of the anti-graft agency maintained the highest standards of integrity while investigating and prosecuting corruption cases.

The EFCC chairman said the commission had also introduced measures to strengthen accountability among its personnel, including a gift policy designed to regulate the acceptance and declaration of gifts by staff.

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission has invited former Bayelsa State Governor, Timipre Sylva, to make himself available for questioning.

This is in connection with an alleged $14.86 million fraud when he was former Minister of State for Petroleum Resources.

The commission’s spokesman, Dele Oyewale, stated this on Monday while reacting to Sylva’s public reappearance, and his allegation that the anti-graft agency had conducted itself more as an organ of the All Progressives Congress than as an institution of the state.

“He has been declared wanted; he should make himself available to the commission,” Oyewale said.

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The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) is set to introduce Facial Biometric Verification (FBV) in the conduct of the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).

The aim according to the examination body is to tackle impersonation, examination malpractice and restore greater integrity to the examination process.

The development was contained in the Board’s weekly bulletin released on Monday.

Under the new arrangement, JAMB said it would partner with the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) to verify candidates through live facial recognition before they are allowed to sit the UTME.

The Board said candidates seeking to take the examination would undergo live facial verification through an application, with the verification result forwarded to NIMC.

The identity management agency would subsequently return a code to JAMB to either affirm or reject the candidate’s identity claim.