A week after the Senate declared that corruption among politicians could not be compared with the rot in the banking industry, it yesterday declared that the character of the convicted frontline politician, Chief Bode George, should not be that of all politicians.

The Senate’s view came with its expression of satisfaction with the reasons given by the Sudanese authorities for the disruption of the scheduled visit of a Senate delegation to that country on Monday.

Asked to locate the conviction of George within his assertion of the near-innocence of the political class, Senate spokesman, Senator Ayogu Eze, at a briefing, yesterday said:

“Whatever is the decision of the court, as law-abiding citizens, we are bound by the judgment of any court until that judgment is discharged.

“I think we must begin to draw a line between what individuals do in their personal capacity and what they do inside the party because the party is made up of individuals and you cannot say that the character of one individual is the character of the party.

“That will be a very erroneous assumption. I believe that we should wait for the whole process to unravel. Let us get all the facts in, because even as they were being taking away, their counsel were still protesting their innocence and giving indication that they were going to challenge the process,’’ he added.

Eze also dismissed insinuations that his defence of the political class was on account of suspicions of the imminent arrest of some defaulting debtors in the Senate.

He said the Senate would not in any way defend anyone found to have implicated himself in any financial impropriety.