Chairman/Editor-in-chief of Owena Press Limited, publishers of The Hope Newspapers, Mr. Kayode Fasua, has described a recent publication that he was shielding age falsifiers to remain in the services of the company as “a careless lie fabricated by nay-sayers, who are envious of my modest achievements.”

He also said the claim that two Hilux vans disappeared from the fleet of the newspaper house was a criminal dimension to telling lies, as it was defamatory.

Fasua, who assumed the leadership of the state-owned media outfit October, last year, said in a statement issued in Akure on Sunday that, “I stand to fulfill my mandate as assigned by Mr. Governor, to revamp the newspaper house and bring my wealth of experience to bear on its operations.”

“In the first place, I couldn’t have shielded age or certificate falsifiers to remain here because I willingly set up panels to investigate such people and was not coersed to do so.

“I set up the age verification panel which sat for two days last May, in response to whistle-blowing from some staff members.

“The panel, composed by four external members and three technical assistants from here, sat for two days to screen all 95 staff members but submitted its report over two months after.

“We preened through the report which was highly helpful and resolved to do other investigations, tracing correlation of school attendance with declared age, as we discovered some later-day court affidavits as suspect,” he disclosed.

Fasua added that the management was still in the process of sieving the documents of affected staff when the state’s anti-graft commission invited him on clarifications, based on a petition received by the commission.

“The commission did not disclose to me the author of the petition but I yielded to them all that they required on the issue.

“Again, the unknown petitioner also alleged that two Hilux vans were missing from our fleet, an accusation which I speedily disproved through overwhelming evidence.

“When I arrived here last October, I met an accidented and badly damaged Hilux van on ground but a few months after, the General Administration arm of the Governor’s Office demanded the evacuation to the pool, of grounded vehicles littering government establishmets, and I released the damaged Hilux van to them,” Fasua further clarified.

He said upon his arrival, he repaired the grounded staff bus and that it is now functioning, and that another damaged Toyota car of the company is currently at a mechanical workshop in Akure, undergoing repairs.

“It is on record that between October last year and now, we revived our printing Press and thus are able to save some good money which we had been expending on printing outside.

“When I came, I found the newspaper was coming out in hardcopy once a week, but after a while, I added the weekend title in hardcopy, and only recently, we launched The Hope Magazine.

“I similarly introduced a digital frontpage daily publication to invite readers to our website and at the last count, the site attracted average 50,000 readers in the early hours of the day,” Fasua highlighted.

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