14 September 2017, Sweetcrude, Lagos – Aiteo Group has alleged the involvement of cash in a latest campaign by a group working to impugn its corporate integrity.
It stated that in the latest series of plans to malign the reputation of Aiteo and its Executive Vice Chairman, Benedict Peters, the group involved in the campaign and their representative have started to distribute large amounts of cash to unleash a fresh campaign attacking its noble and altruistic sponsorship of the Nigerian Senior National Team, Nigerian Football Federation, NFF, and the competition previously known as the Federation Cup.
It stated that it would have ignored this exertion as the result of its intervention in Nigerian football is evident to all, but for an alarm raised by a London-based journalist of international repute that she was offered a huge amount of cash in London with directives to write and syndicate damning reports to undermine the reputation of Aiteo.
The company explained that the recent revelation had given answers to why everything Aiteo had done in recent times had been disgracefully and unsustainably attacked to the extent that even its sponsorship of the NFF and the Federation Cup, a corporate social responsibility initiative that has brought considerable delight to tens of millions of Nigerians – was being questioned.
It maintained that in the past, sponsored smear articles were surreptitiously distributed, but that now, the proponents of these campaigns had attained such heights of desperation that they have abandoned every discretion in the bid to discredit Aiteo’s achievements to the extent of distributing cash for spurious reports. Our suspicion is that this is not unrelated to our drive to attract additional, increased direct foreign investment in expansion plans to our operations and output worth more than US$4 billion.
“There is incontrovertible evidence that this latest move will not be the last as the mischief makers have remained committedly recalcitrant, in the last few months,” the company said In a statement issued in Lagos, but stressed that “by and large, the truth always overtakes a lie, no matter how rampaging the lie is”.
