Nigeria’s anti-fraud office has on Wednesday denied dropping graft charges against former minister of petroleum resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke.

“It is fake news, just disregard it,” Wilson Uwujaren, Economic and Financial Crimes Commission spokesman, told Newsmen in a phone conversation.

Asked if there was an amendment of charges against the former minister, Uwujaren again said it is all “fake news.”

The EFCC spokesman in a statement explained that prosecution of Diezani for a 14-count charge has suffered setbacks because other defendants in the case were unavailable, insisting that the case is still court.

“The only development was that the Commission took a prosecutorial decision to split the initial 14-count charge to enable separate arraignment of the defendants following a spate of adjournments that prevented the arraignment of the defendants more than one year after the case was listed,” Uwujaren said.

“The charges were first filed on November 28, 2018. Since then, every attempt to arraign the defendants had been frustrated by one excuse or the other.”

The EFCC spokesman said the defendants were unavailable in more than four times that the matter was called for arraignment.

Uwujaren explained that -it was either that Lanre Adesanya was sick and bedridden in a London Hospital or Nnamdi Okonkwo was hypertensive and on admission in a hospital or Stanley Lawson had a domestic accident and could not appear in court.

“It was clear that these recurring excuses were ploys to frustrate the arraignment,” Uwujaren said. To get around the excuses, Uwujaren disclosed that the EFCC took a deliberate decision to separately prosecute the defendants in different courts.

The decision, he said explains why the four-count amended charge was brought against Dauda Lawal, a former executive director of First Bank, did not include other defendants, except the two others- Diezani Alison-Madueke and Ben Otti.