Curator

http://ift.tt/eA8V8J By Ben Agande The Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission has arraigned the Chief Executive Officer, General Duties and Procurement Officer Kaduna State Polytechnic, Mr. Ahmed Umar, for alleged contract inflation and award of contracts to a company which he owned. In a statement signed by the spokesperson of the commission, Rashidat Okodowa, the commission said Mr Umar was arraigned before Honourable Justice M.T.M Tukur of Kaduna State High Court 7 sitting in Kaduna. According to the statement, the accused was arraigned on a 7-count charge bordering on holding a private interest in the award of contracts, fraudulent acquisition of property, conferring corrupt advantage upon himself and inflation of goods and services to the tune of N39,361,027.50. The statement said “Mr. Umar was said to have inflated the cost of an executive conference table from N350,000 to N1,250,000 and the cost of a Chinese carpet from N567,600 to N2,017,600. ...

http://ift.tt/eA8V8J European Union antitrust regulators on Thursday said they would fine Facebook 110 million euros (122.4 million dollars) for providing misleading information over its purchase of messaging service WhatsApp in 2014. Calling it a “proportionate and deterrent fine,” the European Commission, which acts as the EU’s competition watchdog, said Facebook had said it could not automatically match user accounts on its namesake platform and WhatsApp but two years later launched a service that did exactly that. “The Commission has found that, contrary to Facebook’s statements in the 2014 merger review process, the technical possibility of automatically matching Facebook and WhatsApp users’ identities already existed in 2014, and that Facebook staff were aware of such a possibility,” the Commission said. The commission added that the fine would not reverse the Commission’s decision to clear the purchase of WhatsApp and was unrelated to separate investigations into data protec...

http://ift.tt/2qQlmWt Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko / AFP PHOTO / Jure MAKOVEC The Ukrainian presidential administration said its website had been attacked by Russia in apparent retaliation for Kiev’s decision to block prominent Russian social networks. “We have been witnessing the Russian response to the president’s decree about closing access to Russian social networks,” President Petro Poroshenko’s deputy administration chief Dmytro Shymkiv said in a statement posted late Tuesday on Facebook. “The president’s website has sustained an organised attack.” Shymkiv added that IT specialists had the situation under control and that the website was no longer under threat. The website was accessible on Wednesday morning in Kiev. There was no immediate response to Kiev’s accusation from Moscow. IT specialists and Western governments are rarely able to pin a hacking attack directly on the Kremlin but often accuse groups or individuals close to the Russian government of b...