The ad hoc committee set up by the House of Representatives to review the controversial report on the probe of alleged spending of billions in the power sector has decided to undertake a fresh investigation.

With this, the ad hoc committee headed by Deputy Chief Whip of the House Aminu Waziri Tambuwal has dumped the report produced by the Godwin Elumelu power committee.

The House power committee had after months of investigation presented a report which indicted former President Olusegun Obasanjo and top officials of his administration including former ministers of power.

Following controversies over the content of the report, particularly the disowning of the report by some members of the Elumelu committee, the House raised the Tambuwal panel to review the first probe.

But sources within the committee said the new panel decided to dump the report mainly because it was not clear on the amount of money funnelled into the power sector within the period reviewed-1999 to 2007.

"In all the 88 recommendations made by the Committee on Power, there was no where they made references to how much was spent in the power sector and whether there was corruption by any of the individuals or companies indicted by the committee," a member of the committee told Daily Trust on condition of anonymity.

"If you have the report, go through it and you will discover that the committee reported that the sum of $13.28bn was spent in the sector but the report failed to state how the money was actually spent, who benefitted,and or whether the monies were wrongly or corruptly disbursed."

Daily Trust learnt that the ad hoc committee has now resolved to pursue the same mandate as the one earlier given to the Committee on Power, which was to "carry out a comprehensive and thorough investigation and conduct a public hearing into how the huge sums of money was expended on power generation, transmission and distribution without any commensurate result."

The Tambuwal committee was given a week to submit its report, but it asked for additional one week to be able to get fresh evidence from some agencies and officials. The additional time elapsed last week, but the committee did not present any report and no official explanation was publicly given.

"It was part of the problem that caused the delay in submitting our report as mandated by the House," a member of the review committee told our reporter "You'll recall that the House had given us seven days but later extended it with another week. But we underestimated the job, as we found out during our sittings that the report was incoherent. We had to request for fresh documents from the principal actors, that's the Ministry of Power, Central Bank of Nigeria and host of other stakeholders."

Consideration of the report of the Elumelu Committee became controversial in the House as majority of lawmakers rejected it.One of the Elumelu committee members who disowned the report, Rep Ajibola Muraina (PDP, Oyo State), had said "All these noise about spending huge money without commensurate results are mere propaganda. I humbly refer you to the whole gamut of the committee's verbatim report and particularly the evidence of the Central Bank Governor that no money is lost, that the remaining monies remain intact in the form of LC (Letters of Credit) as the various contracting companies only drew monies from the LC on the stre-ngth of their performance."

Another member, Dr Ahmed Salik, also said he did not participate in writing the report.

The Elumelu committee recommended further investigation by anti-graft agencies of former President Olusegun Obasanjo, Cross River State Governor Liyel Imoke and former Governor of Ondo State Olusegun Agagu for their roles in the award of contracts for the power projects.