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Fraud, Ponzi Schemes and Terror Financing: A Story About Banking In Nigeria
There is a problem with Nigerian banking, and it’s worse than you think. Much worse.
In May 2022, shortly after my story about Chinese loan sharks in West Africa went up, a number of new tips and leads started trickling in. It looked at first, as though a follow-up story would emerge, focusing on how some Nigerian banks still offer banking services to illegal loan sharks despite CBN regulations expressly forbidding this. Wema Bank – unsurprisingly – was the most regular offender in this category, lending its support to multiple illegal loan sharks up until as recently as the time stamps in the images below.
As I trawled through the leads and my own mounting pile of untold story ideas sitting on my Google Drive however, I started to realise something – there was a much greater issue at play here than a few banks bending KYC rules to bank some customers that ought not to be banked. These were borderline unbelievable stories – stories about aggressively fraudulent behaviour by Nigerian banks presented with evidence that was as devastating as it was undeniable.
What is more, these were not stories about a few “bad eggs” in the Nigerian banking sector. Pretty much all of Nigeria’s major banks were implicated, albeit to differing extents. In the interest of brevity, an editorial decision was made to tell the 4 most disturbing stories in no particular order.
There is a story about collusion with regulators to cheat customers and brazenly steal their property. There is a story about illegal, unauthorised account openings which potentially expose customers to an entire world of pain and liability. There is even a story about brazen collaboration with ponzi schemes and illegal investment programs.
Most alarmingly, there is a common denominator of regulatory weakness and complicity, if not outright collusion across all the stories, which culminates in a story about inflows from Qatar potentially financing terrorism in Nigeria for well over a decade. While working on this story, I reached out to no fewer than 6 financial institutions and regulators who were implicated in the maze of documents and testimony I went through.
WEMA, UBA And The Unwanted Accounts: Nigeria’s Wells Fargo Moment?
In 2016, a scandal broke out at Wells Fargo Bank, which at the time was the world’s largest bank. It emerged that over 3.5 million accounts had been secretly opened for customers without their knowledge and authorisation, in response to unrealistic in-house sales and marketing targets. Staff were incentivised to open as many accounts for their customers as possible, and the bank knowingly looked the other way when basic KYC protocols such as customer permission were breached.
In response to the scandal, Wells Fargo fired over 5,000 employees and paid over $3 billion in penalties under a settlement announced by the US Justice Department in 2020. Given the amount of damaging publicity the scandal received, it became an opportunity for banks and banking regulators around the world to review and tighten their operating practices to avoid getting caught up in a similar mess. In Nigeria however, it was treated not as a cautionary tale, but as inspiration for a potentially even bigger brewing scandal.From May 2022 for example, hundreds of tweets like this began appearing:
Apparently, to celebrate the 5th anniversary of Wema Bank’s digital banking division ALAT, the bank had set a target for its sales team that could either be described as quite ambitious or entirely insane, depending on which side of the fence you stand on. The target, the bank said, was to open 1 million new accounts in one day. For reference, Nigeria had about 134 million bank accounts in 2021, which meant that Wema wished to increase this number by almost 1 percent in just 24 hours.Even more incredibly, when the bank would later go on to announce that it actually somehow achieved this target, it somehow did not raise an eyebrow.
Apart from some excellent work by Olalekan Fakoyejo of Ripples Nigeria, the potential severity of the financial crime that had just been perpetrated on thousands – possibly hundreds of thousands – of Nigerians went completely unreported.
In some instances, the bank openly admitted to some of these new “customers” who raised a challenge, that they had been illegally onboarded without their knowledge and consent “because someone with their information thought they will be a good fit.”
When this particular gentleman reached out to the bank via email to pursue the issue further, he got the following response.
Putting aide the disingenuousness of claiming that a customer has nothing to be worried out because an account fraudulently opened using his identity is allegedly not linked to his Bank Verification Number (BVN), this email also failed to deal with an equally pressing issue which he reiterated below.
In other words, there is a clandestine market for private information of Nigerians that Wema Bank apparently has access to. What is more, it is not just Wema Bank. Other banks have also been accused of unauthorised account openings, but perhaps it is the example of UBA that illustrates the sheer depth of criminality and fraudulent behaviour that increasingly characterises the relationship between Nigerian banks and their customers.
This particular story is taken from a case file at the Federal High Court in Lagos, where on May 6, 2022, Justice Akintayo Aluko became the first Nigerian judge to issue a ruling against a Nigerian bank for opening an account using a customer’s identity without their knowledge and authorisation. The full case file is available here.
According to the case file, the complainant, Mr. Chiebuka Nworah received a $450 payment in March 2021. Instead of his UBA domiciliary account which he had opened with the bank in 2020 however, this payment went to a new domiciliary account that the bank had opened for him without his knowledge or permission. Upon receiving an SMS alert from the bank informing him about his new account and the $450 credited into it, he visited UBA’s head office at Marina, Lagos, demanding an explanation
The bank’s risible explanation was that it had opened the new account for him so as to comply with the CBN’s ‘Naira 4 Dollar’ scheme which authorised banks to set up domiciliary accounts for customers that did not have them. Seeing as he already had a domiciliary account, this was clearly a nonsensical reason, but the bank refused to refund the money into his existing account or close the fraudulent account, even after he wrote to them with these demands twice.
Nworah decided to go to court, and then – coincidentally – UBA immediately sent his lawyer a letter claiming that the new account had been opened due to a “system glitch” and that the $450 had been refunded to his existing account. No bank statement or proof was provided to corroborate the alleged refund.
Delivering his ruling, Justice Aluko said:
“The content of the letter of the Respondent’s counsel dated 16/11/2021 is a further confirmation establishing the bank’s violation of the applicant’s right to privacy provided in Section 37 of the constitution. I agree with the Applicant that he is entitled to compensation in terms of damages for the Respondent’s wrongful, unjustified, unlawful and unwarranted breach and infraction of his constitutional right to privacy.”
Nworah was awarded N2,500,000 in damages against UBA, which was ordered to pay a further N100,000 in costs.
Polaris Bank And The Customer Who Can’t Get An Account Statement
In 2008, Yorkshire Limited, a private company in Lagos took out a loan from Polaris Bank, which was then known as Skye Bank. The initial loan amount remains shrouded in secrecy as I was not able to get hold of the initial loan agreement. All that is known for sure is that it was a 10-figure amount, and all was going well until December 2013 when Skye Bank sent the company a confirmation of its loan balance stating that it was N4,159,319,763.53.
A few hours later on the same day, another confirmation of loan balance came in from Skye Bank with a completely different figure on it. This time, the stated loan balance left to be repaid was N5,262,074,147.09. No explanation was offered for why there was a N1.1 billion disparity.
Alarmed by the unprecedented phenomenon of a bank getting its customer’s account balance wrong by over N1.1 billion, the company requested a statement of account from Skye Bank, and this is where the “fun” started. Skye Bank did not provide the statement or give any reason why. Between 2013 and 2017, the company made several attempts to obtain a statement of account from Skye Bank – something that should normally be provided instantly after a single request.
Still, no statement was forthcoming from the bank. In October 2017, the company wrote officially to Skye Bank asking for its statement of account. Once again, Skye Bank ignored the request and offered no explanation.
Finally in December 2017, the company went through the legal route, writing the bank through its legal consultants, Wiseview Legal Consultancy to demand for its statement of accounts. Once again, there was radio silence from Skye Bank. Finally Yorkshire Limited went to court, obtaining a ruling from the Federal High Court in Lagos on April 17, 2018 ordering Skye Bank to provide the requested statement of account immediately.
Still Skye Bank refused to produce the requested statement, despite this clearly being a violation of a court order. On April 19, 2 days after the court judgment, the company’s lawyers once again wrote to Skye Bank demanding that the bank comply with the court order and provide a statement of account for Yorkshire Limited. Yet again, Skye Bank responded with – nothing. No statement. No explanation. No conversation. Nothing.
Fraud, Ponzi Schemes and Terror Financing: A Story About Banking In Nigeria
There is a problem with Nigerian banking, and it’s worse than you think. Much worse.
In May 2022, shortly after my story about Chinese loan sharks in West Africa went up, a number of new tips and leads started trickling in. It looked at first, as though a follow-up story would emerge, focusing on how some Nigerian banks still offer banking services to illegal loan sharks despite CBN regulations expressly forbidding this. Wema Bank – unsurprisingly – was the most regular offender in this category, lending its support to multiple illegal loan sharks up until as recently as the time stamps in the images below.
As I trawled through the leads and my own mounting pile of untold story ideas sitting on my Google Drive however, I started to realise something – there was a much greater issue at play here than a few banks bending KYC rules to bank some customers that ought not to be banked. These were borderline unbelievable stories – stories about aggressively fraudulent behaviour by Nigerian banks presented with evidence that was as devastating as it was undeniable.
What is more, these were not stories about a few “bad eggs” in the Nigerian banking sector. Pretty much all of Nigeria’s major banks were implicated, albeit to differing extents. In the interest of brevity, an editorial decision was made to tell the 4 most disturbing stories in no particular order.
There is a story about collusion with regulators to cheat customers and brazenly steal their property. There is a story about illegal, unauthorised account openings which potentially expose customers to an entire world of pain and liability. There is even a story about brazen collaboration with ponzi schemes and illegal investment programs.
Most alarmingly, there is a common denominator of regulatory weakness and complicity, if not outright collusion across all the stories, which culminates in a story about inflows from Qatar potentially financing terrorism in Nigeria for well over a decade. While working on this story, I reached out to no fewer than 6 financial institutions and regulators who were implicated in the maze of documents and testimony I went through.
As always, they had nothing to say.
WEMA, UBA And The Unwanted Accounts: Nigeria’s Wells Fargo Moment?
In 2016, a scandal broke out at Wells Fargo Bank, which at the time was the world’s largest bank. It emerged that over 3.5 million accounts had been secretly opened for customers without their knowledge and authorisation, in response to unrealistic in-house sales and marketing targets. Staff were incentivised to open as many accounts for their customers as possible, and the bank knowingly looked the other way when basic KYC protocols such as customer permission were breached.
Source: NPR In response to the scandal, Wells Fargo fired over 5,000 employees and paid over $3 billion in penalties under a settlement announced by the US Justice Department in 2020. Given the amount of damaging publicity the scandal received, it became an opportunity for banks and banking regulators around the world to review and tighten their operating practices to avoid getting caught up in a similar mess. In Nigeria however, it was treated not as a cautionary tale, but as inspiration for a potentially even bigger brewing scandal.
From May 2022 for example, hundreds of tweets like this began appearing:
Apparently, to celebrate the 5th anniversary of Wema Bank’s digital banking division ALAT, the bank had set a target for its sales team that could either be described as quite ambitious or entirely insane, depending on which side of the fence you stand on. The target, the bank said, was to open 1 million new accounts in one day. For reference, Nigeria had about 134 million bank accounts in 2021, which meant that Wema wished to increase this number by almost 1 percent in just 24 hours.
Even more incredibly, when the bank would later go on to announce that it actually somehow achieved this target, it somehow did not raise an eyebrow.
Apart from some excellent work by Olalekan Fakoyejo of Ripples Nigeria, the potential severity of the financial crime that had just been perpetrated on thousands – possibly hundreds of thousands – of Nigerians went completely unreported. In some instances, the bank openly admitted to some of these new “customers” who raised a challenge, that they had been illegally onboarded without their knowledge and consent “because someone with their information thought they will be a good fit.”
When this particular gentleman reached out to the bank via email to pursue the issue further, he got the following response.
Putting aide the disingenuousness of claiming that a customer has nothing to be worried out because an account fraudulently opened using his identity is allegedly not linked to his Bank Verification Number (BVN), this email also failed to deal with an equally pressing issue which he reiterated below.
In other words, there is a clandestine market for private information of Nigerians that Wema Bank apparently has access to. What is more, it is not just Wema Bank. Other banks have also been accused of unauthorised account openings, but perhaps it is the example of UBA that illustrates the sheer depth of criminality and fraudulent behaviour that increasingly characterises the relationship between Nigerian banks and their customers.
This particular story is taken from a case file at the Federal High Court in Lagos, where on May 6, 2022, Justice Akintayo Aluko became the first Nigerian judge to issue a ruling against a Nigerian bank for opening an account using a customer’s identity without their knowledge and authorisation. The full case file is available here.
According to the case file, the complainant, Mr. Chiebuka Nworah received a $450 payment in March 2021. Instead of his UBA domiciliary account which he had opened with the bank in 2020 however, this payment went to a new domiciliary account that the bank had opened for him without his knowledge or permission. Upon receiving an SMS alert from the bank informing him about his new account and the $450 credited into it, he visited UBA’s head office at Marina, Lagos, demanding an explanation.
The bank’s risible explanation was that it had opened the new account for him so as to comply with the CBN’s ‘Naira 4 Dollar’ scheme which authorised banks to set up domiciliary accounts for customers that did not have them. Seeing as he already had a domiciliary account, this was clearly a nonsensical reason, but the bank refused to refund the money into his existing account or close the fraudulent account, even after he wrote to them with these demands twice.
Nworah decided to go to court, and then – coincidentally – UBA immediately sent his lawyer a letter claiming that the new account had been opened due to a “system glitch” and that the $450 had been refunded to his existing account. No bank statement or proof was provided to corroborate the alleged refund.
Delivering his ruling, Justice Aluko said:
“The content of the letter of the Respondent’s counsel dated 16/11/2021 is a further confirmation establishing the bank’s violation of the applicant’s right to privacy provided in Section 37 of the constitution. I agree with the Applicant that he is entitled to compensation in terms of damages for the Respondent’s wrongful, unjustified, unlawful and unwarranted breach and infraction of his constitutional right to privacy.”
Nworah was awarded N2,500,000 in damages against UBA, which was ordered to pay a further N100,000 in costs.
For Nworah, the story at least had a happy ending. The customer in the next story had no such luck.
Polaris Bank And The Customer Who Can’t Get An Account Statement
In 2008, Yorkshire Limited, a private company in Lagos took out a loan from Polaris Bank, which was then known as Skye Bank. The initial loan amount remains shrouded in secrecy as I was not able to get hold of the initial loan agreement. All that is known for sure is that it was a 10-figure amount, and all was going well until December 2013 when Skye Bank sent the company a confirmation of its loan balance stating that it was N4,159,319,763.53.
A few hours later on the same day, another confirmation of loan balance came in from Skye Bank with a completely different figure on it. This time, the stated loan balance left to be repaid was N5,262,074,147.09. No explanation was offered for why there was a N1.1 billion disparity.
Alarmed by the unprecedented phenomenon of a bank getting its customer’s account balance wrong by over N1.1 billion, the company requested a statement of account from Skye Bank, and this is where the “fun” started. Skye Bank did not provide the statement or give any reason why. Between 2013 and 2017, the company made several attempts to obtain a statement of account from Skye Bank – something that should normally be provided instantly after a single request.
Still, no statement was forthcoming from the bank. In October 2017, the company wrote officially to Skye Bank asking for its statement of account. Once again, Skye Bank ignored the request and offered no explanation.
Finally in December 2017, the company went through the legal route, writing the bank through its legal consultants, Wiseview Legal Consultancy to demand for its statement of accounts. Once again, there was radio silence from Skye Bank. Finally Yorkshire Limited went to court, obtaining a ruling from the Federal High Court in Lagos on April 17, 2018 ordering Skye Bank to provide the requested statement of account immediately.
Still Skye Bank refused to produce the requested statement, despite this clearly being a violation of a court order. On April 19, 2 days after the court judgment, the company’s lawyers once again wrote to Skye Bank demanding that the bank comply with the court order and provide a statement of account for Yorkshire Limited. Yet again, Skye Bank responded with – nothing. No statement. No explanation. No conversation. Nothing.
On April 26, 2018, company lawyers once again wrote to Skye Bank demanding for the account statement as ordered by the court. Once again, no prizes for guessing Skye Bank’s response.
Yorkshire Limited also wrote to the CBN without getting any significant response. Out of options, the company decided to go to court a second time to get the prior ruling enforced. Instituted at the Federal High Court in Lagos on April 15, 2019, the suit sought to compel the bank (now Polaris Bank following a CBN takeover) to comply with the prior court order and produce the statement of accounts which it had been hiding since 2013.At this time, following Skye Bank’s transformation into Polaris Bank, the Asset Management Corporation Of Nigeria (AMCON) had taken over the bank’s liabilities and assets, including its loan portfolio. Somewhere on this loan portfolio was Yorkshire Limited’s mystery loan without an account statement. In January 2019, AMCON wrote to Yorkshire informing the company that it now owned the loan. No loan balance was stated in the letter.
With Yorkshire’s case in the Federal High Court pending and heading toward another loss for Polaris Bank, a bit of “magic” suddenly took place. First in March 2020, AMCON and Polaris Bank instituted a joint motion to dispute the jurisdiction of the Court to hear the case. This infamous “technical justice” tactic is one that typically characterises Nigerian court cases and keeps cases going indefinitely.
This objection was apparently based on an amendment to the AMCON Act.
The ruling by Justice T.G. Ringim which can be found here, makes for interesting reading. In the ruling, Justice Ringim ultimately agreed with the objection challenging the court’s jurisdiction, but he also confirmed that neither Polaris Bank nor AMCON had in fact, been able to substantiate their claim of Yorkshire’s indebtedness by providing any documentation to confirm the debt and its amount.
Justice Ringim did appear to contradict himself in the same ruling. According to him, AMCON’s purchase of Yorkshire’s mystery loan with Skye/Polaris Bank in 2018, as stated by AMCON was also enough fact to suggest that Yorkshire is indeed indebted to Polaris Bank – even though nobody knows how much, including apparently AMCON and Polaris Bank itself.
Yorkshire subsequently filed an appeal against the ruling, and the case remains in court. Why exactly was it so important to AMCON and Polaris Bank that Yorkshire Limited must not have access to its statement of account to find out exactly how much – if anything – it owed? What happened next provides a clue.
With the case still in court, AMCON suddenly began making rapid moves to sell 5 properties in Ikoyi, Lagos, which were used as collateral for the initial loan. Bear in mind that the very loan balance in question had remained shrouded in secrecy since 2013. Somehow, despite not knowing how much the loan balance was, AMCON knew how much was needed from the sale of 5 high-value properties to liquidate it.
This forced the company to immediately take out a “Caveat Emptor” advertorial in The Guardian newspaper of Monday, June 13, 2022, warning any prospective buyers that the properties are subject to an ongoing legal process.
So here we have a poorly run bank that offered multiple balance figures on the same account with a variance of N1.1 billion in 2013, and then spent the subsequent 9 years refusing to issue a statement of account so that the customer might confirm how much they actually owed. Having been dragged to court twice to issue the statement of account, the bank and AMCON – a government body – then teamed up to sabotage a legal process aimed at getting the bank to issue the customer a statement of account. AMCON then went into ‘omonile’ mode, trying to sell expensive properties used as collateral by the borrower with the case still in court.
The final icing on the cake? On August 2, 2022, Peoples Gazette reported that the CBN had received presidential permission to sell Polaris Bank to Auwal Gombe, a relative of former military dictator Ibrahim Babangida for a knockdown price of N40 billion, following AMCON’s N1.2 trillion rescue of the lender in 2018.
Has Yorkshire Limited been the victim of a long-standing play to help politically linked businessmen to gobble up valuable assets (such as Banana Island property) on the cheap by using a bank to basically steal them from their owners?
Only the courts will decide that now.
Hopefully.
Access Bank And The MBA Forex Inside Story
These days, Maxwell Chizi Odum is known as the criminal mastermind behind one of the biggest ponzi schemes ever conceived in Africa. He has been declared wanted by Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and his whereabouts have been unknown since 2021. Once a respected pastor and mentor, he now lives as a fugitive, albeit a rich one, possibly with a second passport and a new identity.
Things used to be very different for ‘Brother Maxwell.’ Following a fairly nondescript corporate career in the oil servicing industry, he came to prominence as a widely liked and admired pastor at the popular Believers’ Loveworld (Christ Embassy) church in Port Harcourt. It was here that he would lay the groundwork for what would become a N213bn heist.
As in so often the case in Nigeria, not many people bothered to ask how a Pentecostal pastor with no significant background in finance or investment supposedly figured out an investment secret guaranteed to make them fabulously wealthy. All they saw was that other people paid money into this thing known on the street as MBA Forex, and they came out with amazing double digit returns via an investment system that was far too complicated for anyone to really understand, even if they wanted to.
Something, something…trading strategy, something…binary forex options, something, something…cryptocurrency volatility. And then something about a matrix-based trading system, which you know, absolutely, definitely, positively was not a ponzi scheme like MMM.
Naturally, it was of course, a ponzi scheme, pretty much exactly like MMM.
Under Nigerian law, the act of soliciting for and receiving monetary deposits from the public constitutes an act of carrying on banking business which requires a banking licence from the CBN. Further, the commercial offer of any investments that promise fixed interest amounts when funds are invested for fixed periods of time is a strictly regulated activity that falls squarely under the oversight of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
MBA Forex was doing both of these regulated activities despite having no kind of regulatory approval or permission whatsoever. In fact, beyond registration with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) – which pretty much anything with a pulse and a valid ID can do without any kind of regulatory spotlight – MBA Forex was an entirely illegal operation.
The difference between MBA Forex and MMM was that while MMM tried to obfuscate its centralised nature by using individual bank accounts, MBA Forex openly accepted funds into the corporate accounts it was somehow able to open at Access Bank, Ecobank, FCMB, First Bank, GT Bank, Sterling Bank, Sun Trust Bank, UBA, Unity Bank, Union Bank and Zenith Bank – despite having exactly zero CBN and SEC authorisation. This is where the story gets interesting.
Fraud, Ponzi Schemes and Terror Financing: A Story About Banking In Nigeria
There is a problem with Nigerian banking, and it’s worse than you think. Much worse.
In May 2022, shortly after my story about Chinese loan sharks in West Africa went up, a number of new tips and leads started trickling in. It looked at first, as though a follow-up story would emerge, focusing on how some Nigerian banks still offer banking services to illegal loan sharks despite CBN regulations expressly forbidding this. Wema Bank – unsurprisingly – was the most regular offender in this category, lending its support to multiple illegal loan sharks up until as recently as the time stamps in the images below.
As I trawled through the leads and my own mounting pile of untold story ideas sitting on my Google Drive however, I started to realise something – there was a much greater issue at play here than a few banks bending KYC rules to bank some customers that ought not to be banked. These were borderline unbelievable stories – stories about aggressively fraudulent behaviour by Nigerian banks presented with evidence that was as devastating as it was undeniable.
What is more, these were not stories about a few “bad eggs” in the Nigerian banking sector. Pretty much all of Nigeria’s major banks were implicated, albeit to differing extents. In the interest of brevity, an editorial decision was made to tell the 4 most disturbing stories in no particular order.
There is a story about collusion with regulators to cheat customers and brazenly steal their property. There is a story about illegal, unauthorised account openings which potentially expose customers to an entire world of pain and liability. There is even a story about brazen collaboration with ponzi schemes and illegal investment programs.
Most alarmingly, there is a common denominator of regulatory weakness and complicity, if not outright collusion across all the stories, which culminates in a story about inflows from Qatar potentially financing terrorism in Nigeria for well over a decade. While working on this story, I reached out to no fewer than 6 financial institutions and regulators who were implicated in the maze of documents and testimony I went through.
As always, they had nothing to say.
WEMA, UBA And The Unwanted Accounts: Nigeria’s Wells Fargo Moment?
In 2016, a scandal broke out at Wells Fargo Bank, which at the time was the world’s largest bank. It emerged that over 3.5 million accounts had been secretly opened for customers without their knowledge and authorisation, in response to unrealistic in-house sales and marketing targets. Staff were incentivised to open as many accounts for their customers as possible, and the bank knowingly looked the other way when basic KYC protocols such as customer permission were breached.
Source: NPR In response to the scandal, Wells Fargo fired over 5,000 employees and paid over $3 billion in penalties under a settlement announced by the US Justice Department in 2020. Given the amount of damaging publicity the scandal received, it became an opportunity for banks and banking regulators around the world to review and tighten their operating practices to avoid getting caught up in a similar mess. In Nigeria however, it was treated not as a cautionary tale, but as inspiration for a potentially even bigger brewing scandal.
From May 2022 for example, hundreds of tweets like this began appearing:
Apparently, to celebrate the 5th anniversary of Wema Bank’s digital banking division ALAT, the bank had set a target for its sales team that could either be described as quite ambitious or entirely insane, depending on which side of the fence you stand on. The target, the bank said, was to open 1 million new accounts in one day. For reference, Nigeria had about 134 million bank accounts in 2021, which meant that Wema wished to increase this number by almost 1 percent in just 24 hours.
Even more incredibly, when the bank would later go on to announce that it actually somehow achieved this target, it somehow did not raise an eyebrow.
Apart from some excellent work by Olalekan Fakoyejo of Ripples Nigeria, the potential severity of the financial crime that had just been perpetrated on thousands – possibly hundreds of thousands – of Nigerians went completely unreported. In some instances, the bank openly admitted to some of these new “customers” who raised a challenge, that they had been illegally onboarded without their knowledge and consent “because someone with their information thought they will be a good fit.”
When this particular gentleman reached out to the bank via email to pursue the issue further, he got the following response.
Putting aide the disingenuousness of claiming that a customer has nothing to be worried out because an account fraudulently opened using his identity is allegedly not linked to his Bank Verification Number (BVN), this email also failed to deal with an equally pressing issue which he reiterated below.
In other words, there is a clandestine market for private information of Nigerians that Wema Bank apparently has access to. What is more, it is not just Wema Bank. Other banks have also been accused of unauthorised account openings, but perhaps it is the example of UBA that illustrates the sheer depth of criminality and fraudulent behaviour that increasingly characterises the relationship between Nigerian banks and their customers.
This particular story is taken from a case file at the Federal High Court in Lagos, where on May 6, 2022, Justice Akintayo Aluko became the first Nigerian judge to issue a ruling against a Nigerian bank for opening an account using a customer’s identity without their knowledge and authorisation. The full case file is available here.
According to the case file, the complainant, Mr. Chiebuka Nworah received a $450 payment in March 2021. Instead of his UBA domiciliary account which he had opened with the bank in 2020 however, this payment went to a new domiciliary account that the bank had opened for him without his knowledge or permission. Upon receiving an SMS alert from the bank informing him about his new account and the $450 credited into it, he visited UBA’s head office at Marina, Lagos, demanding an explanation.
The bank’s risible explanation was that it had opened the new account for him so as to comply with the CBN’s ‘Naira 4 Dollar’ scheme which authorised banks to set up domiciliary accounts for customers that did not have them. Seeing as he already had a domiciliary account, this was clearly a nonsensical reason, but the bank refused to refund the money into his existing account or close the fraudulent account, even after he wrote to them with these demands twice.
Nworah decided to go to court, and then – coincidentally – UBA immediately sent his lawyer a letter claiming that the new account had been opened due to a “system glitch” and that the $450 had been refunded to his existing account. No bank statement or proof was provided to corroborate the alleged refund.
Delivering his ruling, Justice Aluko said:
“The content of the letter of the Respondent’s counsel dated 16/11/2021 is a further confirmation establishing the bank’s violation of the applicant’s right to privacy provided in Section 37 of the constitution. I agree with the Applicant that he is entitled to compensation in terms of damages for the Respondent’s wrongful, unjustified, unlawful and unwarranted breach and infraction of his constitutional right to privacy.”
Nworah was awarded N2,500,000 in damages against UBA, which was ordered to pay a further N100,000 in costs.
For Nworah, the story at least had a happy ending. The customer in the next story had no such luck.
Polaris Bank And The Customer Who Can’t Get An Account Statement
In 2008, Yorkshire Limited, a private company in Lagos took out a loan from Polaris Bank, which was then known as Skye Bank. The initial loan amount remains shrouded in secrecy as I was not able to get hold of the initial loan agreement. All that is known for sure is that it was a 10-figure amount, and all was going well until December 2013 when Skye Bank sent the company a confirmation of its loan balance stating that it was N4,159,319,763.53.
A few hours later on the same day, another confirmation of loan balance came in from Skye Bank with a completely different figure on it. This time, the stated loan balance left to be repaid was N5,262,074,147.09. No explanation was offered for why there was a N1.1 billion disparity.
Alarmed by the unprecedented phenomenon of a bank getting its customer’s account balance wrong by over N1.1 billion, the company requested a statement of account from Skye Bank, and this is where the “fun” started. Skye Bank did not provide the statement or give any reason why. Between 2013 and 2017, the company made several attempts to obtain a statement of account from Skye Bank – something that should normally be provided instantly after a single request.
Still, no statement was forthcoming from the bank. In October 2017, the company wrote officially to Skye Bank asking for its statement of account. Once again, Skye Bank ignored the request and offered no explanation.
Finally in December 2017, the company went through the legal route, writing the bank through its legal consultants, Wiseview Legal Consultancy to demand for its statement of accounts. Once again, there was radio silence from Skye Bank. Finally Yorkshire Limited went to court, obtaining a ruling from the Federal High Court in Lagos on April 17, 2018 ordering Skye Bank to provide the requested statement of account immediately.
Still Skye Bank refused to produce the requested statement, despite this clearly being a violation of a court order. On April 19, 2 days after the court judgment, the company’s lawyers once again wrote to Skye Bank demanding that the bank comply with the court order and provide a statement of account for Yorkshire Limited. Yet again, Skye Bank responded with – nothing. No statement. No explanation. No conversation. Nothing.
On April 26, 2018, company lawyers once again wrote to Skye Bank demanding for the account statement as ordered by the court. Once again, no prizes for guessing Skye Bank’s response.
Yorkshire Limited also wrote to the CBN without getting any significant response. Out of options, the company decided to go to court a second time to get the prior ruling enforced. Instituted at the Federal High Court in Lagos on April 15, 2019, the suit sought to compel the bank (now Polaris Bank following a CBN takeover) to comply with the prior court order and produce the statement of accounts which it had been hiding since 2013.
At this time, following Skye Bank’s transformation into Polaris Bank, the Asset Management Corporation Of Nigeria (AMCON) had taken over the bank’s liabilities and assets, including its loan portfolio. Somewhere on this loan portfolio was Yorkshire Limited’s mystery loan without an account statement. In January 2019, AMCON wrote to Yorkshire informing the company that it now owned the loan. No loan balance was stated in the letter.
With Yorkshire’s case in the Federal High Court pending and heading toward another loss for Polaris Bank, a bit of “magic” suddenly took place. First in March 2020, AMCON and Polaris Bank instituted a joint motion to dispute the jurisdiction of the Court to hear the case. This infamous “technical justice” tactic is one that typically characterises Nigerian court cases and keeps cases going indefinitely.
This objection was apparently based on an amendment to the AMCON Act. The ruling by Justice T.G. Ringim which can be found here, makes for interesting reading. In the ruling, Justice Ringim ultimately agreed with the objection challenging the court’s jurisdiction, but he also confirmed that neither Polaris Bank nor AMCON had in fact, been able to substantiate their claim of Yorkshire’s indebtedness by providing any documentation to confirm the debt and its amount.
Justice Ringim did appear to contradict himself in the same ruling. According to him, AMCON’s purchase of Yorkshire’s mystery loan with Skye/Polaris Bank in 2018, as stated by AMCON was also enough fact to suggest that Yorkshire is indeed indebted to Polaris Bank – even though nobody knows how much, including apparently AMCON and Polaris Bank itself.
Yorkshire subsequently filed an appeal against the ruling, and the case remains in court. Why exactly was it so important to AMCON and Polaris Bank that Yorkshire Limited must not have access to its statement of account to find out exactly how much – if anything – it owed? What happened next provides a clue.
With the case still in court, AMCON suddenly began making rapid moves to sell 5 properties in Ikoyi, Lagos, which were used as collateral for the initial loan. Bear in mind that the very loan balance in question had remained shrouded in secrecy since 2013. Somehow, despite not knowing how much the loan balance was, AMCON knew how much was needed from the sale of 5 high-value properties to liquidate it.
This forced the company to immediately take out a “Caveat Emptor” advertorial in The Guardian newspaper of Monday, June 13, 2022, warning any prospective buyers that the properties are subject to an ongoing legal process.
So here we have a poorly run bank that offered multiple balance figures on the same account with a variance of N1.1 billion in 2013, and then spent the subsequent 9 years refusing to issue a statement of account so that the customer might confirm how much they actually owed. Having been dragged to court twice to issue the statement of account, the bank and AMCON – a government body – then teamed up to sabotage a legal process aimed at getting the bank to issue the customer a statement of account. AMCON then went into ‘omonile’ mode, trying to sell expensive properties used as collateral by the borrower with the case still in court.
The final icing on the cake? On August 2, 2022, Peoples Gazette reported that the CBN had received presidential permission to sell Polaris Bank to Auwal Gombe, a relative of former military dictator Ibrahim Babangida for a knockdown price of N40 billion, following AMCON’s N1.2 trillion rescue of the lender in 2018.
Has Yorkshire Limited been the victim of a long-standing play to help politically linked businessmen to gobble up valuable assets (such as Banana Island property) on the cheap by using a bank to basically steal them from their owners?
Only the courts will decide that now.
Hopefully.
Access Bank And The MBA Forex Inside Story
These days, Maxwell Chizi Odum is known as the criminal mastermind behind one of the biggest ponzi schemes ever conceived in Africa. He has been declared wanted by Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and his whereabouts have been unknown since 2021. Once a respected pastor and mentor, he now lives as a fugitive, albeit a rich one, possibly with a second passport and a new identity.
Things used to be very different for ‘Brother Maxwell.’ Following a fairly nondescript corporate career in the oil servicing industry, he came to prominence as a widely liked and admired pastor at the popular Believers’ Loveworld (Christ Embassy) church in Port Harcourt. It was here that he would lay the groundwork for what would become a N213bn heist.
As in so often the case in Nigeria, not many people bothered to ask how a Pentecostal pastor with no significant background in finance or investment supposedly figured out an investment secret guaranteed to make them fabulously wealthy. All they saw was that other people paid money into this thing known on the street as MBA Forex, and they came out with amazing double digit returns via an investment system that was far too complicated for anyone to really understand, even if they wanted to.
Something, something…trading strategy, something…binary forex options, something, something…cryptocurrency volatility. And then something about a matrix-based trading system, which you know, absolutely, definitely, positively was not a ponzi scheme like MMM.
Naturally, it was of course, a ponzi scheme, pretty much exactly like MMM.
Under Nigerian law, the act of soliciting for and receiving monetary deposits from the public constitutes an act of carrying on banking business which requires a banking licence from the CBN. Further, the commercial offer of any investments that promise fixed interest amounts when funds are invested for fixed periods of time is a strictly regulated activity that falls squarely under the oversight of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
MBA Forex was doing both of these regulated activities despite having no kind of regulatory approval or permission whatsoever. In fact, beyond registration with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) – which pretty much anything with a pulse and a valid ID can do without any kind of regulatory spotlight – MBA Forex was an entirely illegal operation.
The difference between MBA Forex and MMM was that while MMM tried to obfuscate its centralised nature by using individual bank accounts, MBA Forex openly accepted funds into the corporate accounts it was somehow able to open at Access Bank, Ecobank, FCMB, First Bank, GT Bank, Sterling Bank, Sun Trust Bank, UBA, Unity Bank, Union Bank and Zenith Bank – despite having exactly zero CBN and SEC authorisation. This is where the story gets interesting.
Enter a company called World Citizen Equity Partners Limited. This company, purportedly a British company that organises citizenship-by-investment for wealthy people, registered in Nigeria on March 21, 2018, a few days after MBA Forex registered on March 14, 2018. WCEP would later claim that it had nothing to do with MBA Forex prior to December 2020, but the screenshot below contradicts this. Keep this in mind because it becomes important later.
In August 2020, Maxwell Odum transferred 100 million of his shares in MBA Forex to WCEP, in a transaction that saw some familiar names take up investment positions in the ponzi scheme.
The two gentlemen mentioned in the documents above are a former House of Representatives member and a former Nigerian Ambassador to the European Union (EU) and African Union (AU) respectively. Exactly why Hon. Ahmed Aliyu Wadada and Ambassador Usman Baraya decided to buy shares in a ponzi scheme remains unclear.
In December 2020, MBA Forex met the inevitable fate of all ponzi schemes, and thousands of Nigerians were thrown into mourning as their dreams of making it rich went up in smoke. Over the next few weeks and months, court orders and regulatory actions began rolling in to freeze accounts and potentially reimburse investors. Access Bank, which had hosted the majority of funds harvested by MBA Forex and Maxwell Odum, was front and centre of the investigation.
The bank however, decided to conceal the true role it played in aiding and abetting the ponzi scheme. In a sworn statement provided through its lawyer, the bank claimed that it had closed all the offending accounts as soon as it was told to, and that in any case, the main MBA Forex account had just a little over N200,000 left inside it. In an effort to hide the central role it played in enabling Maxwell Odum to get away with the scam, Access Bank also lied under oath, stating that World Citizen Equity Partners (Respondent 10) never had an account with the bank.
An affidavit sworn by Dickson Ukaha, a former Access Bank customer relationship manager in Port Harcourt directly contradicted this account of events. In his sworn statement, Ukaha stated that not only did WCEP maintain an account with Access Bank, but several transfers worth hundreds of million of naira – the sort that normally raise every AML red flag in the bank – were made from the MBA Forex account to the WCEP account months before the purported sale by Maxwell Odum.
So here we have a bank that knowingly enabled an illegal investment scheme without CBN or SEC licenses to fleece customers of billions of naira, and then lied under oath afterward to cover up the extent of its involvement in the MBA Forex fiasco. My source informed me that not only did Access Bank lie about not maintaining a WCEP account, but the account is very much active. Just to be sure, I asked for the account details and did a little test transaction to see if it would check out. And sure enough…
Enough said, I think.
Terror Financing And A Shadowy Charity From Qatar
“Abd Al-Rahman al-Nu’aym or Abderrahman Al Nuaimi is a Qatari human rights advocate and co-founder of the Alkarama human rights NGO. He previously taught Islamic Studies at Qatar University, and once served as President of the Qatar Football Association, as well as having been a board member of Qatar Islamic Bank.”
Or that’s what it says on the first 2 lines of his Wikipedia page anyway.
The next line continues, “He has been accused of being “one of the world’s most prolific terrorist financiers.”
Accused” is one way to put it.A 2016 sanctions summary issued by the UN Security Council provides more context about exactly what this guy is about. The statement reads in part:“In 2013, ‘Abd al-Rahman bin ‘Umayr al-Nu’aymi ordered the transfer of nearly $600,000 to Al-Qaida (QDe.004) via an Al-Qaida representative in Syria, Abu-Khalid al Suri (deceased), and intended to transfer nearly $50,000 more. Al-Nu’aymi has facilitated significant financial support to Al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI) (QDe.115), and served as an interlocutor between AQI leaders and Qatar-based donors. Al-Nu’aymi reportedly oversaw the transfer of over $2 million per month to AQI for a period of time. In mid-2012, Al-Nu’aymi provided approximately $250.000 for distribution to Harakaat al-Shabaab al-Mujahidiin leaders Hassan Dahir Aweys and Mukhtar Robow, and intended to provide additional funding.”Fraud, Ponzi Schemes and Terror Financing: A Story About Banking In Nigeria
There is a problem with Nigerian banking, and it’s worse than you think. Much worse.
In May 2022, shortly after my story about Chinese loan sharks in West Africa went up, a number of new tips and leads started trickling in. It looked at first, as though a follow-up story would emerge, focusing on how some Nigerian banks still offer banking services to illegal loan sharks despite CBN regulations expressly forbidding this. Wema Bank – unsurprisingly – was the most regular offender in this category, lending its support to multiple illegal loan sharks up until as recently as the time stamps in the images below.
As I trawled through the leads and my own mounting pile of untold story ideas sitting on my Google Drive however, I started to realise something – there was a much greater issue at play here than a few banks bending KYC rules to bank some customers that ought not to be banked. These were borderline unbelievable stories – stories about aggressively fraudulent behaviour by Nigerian banks presented with evidence that was as devastating as it was undeniable.
What is more, these were not stories about a few “bad eggs” in the Nigerian banking sector. Pretty much all of Nigeria’s major banks were implicated, albeit to differing extents. In the interest of brevity, an editorial decision was made to tell the 4 most disturbing stories in no particular order.
There is a story about collusion with regulators to cheat customers and brazenly steal their property. There is a story about illegal, unauthorised account openings which potentially expose customers to an entire world of pain and liability. There is even a story about brazen collaboration with ponzi schemes and illegal investment programs.
Most alarmingly, there is a common denominator of regulatory weakness and complicity, if not outright collusion across all the stories, which culminates in a story about inflows from Qatar potentially financing terrorism in Nigeria for well over a decade. While working on this story, I reached out to no fewer than 6 financial institutions and regulators who were implicated in the maze of documents and testimony I went through.
As always, they had nothing to say.
WEMA, UBA And The Unwanted Accounts: Nigeria’s Wells Fargo Moment?
In 2016, a scandal broke out at Wells Fargo Bank, which at the time was the world’s largest bank. It emerged that over 3.5 million accounts had been secretly opened for customers without their knowledge and authorisation, in response to unrealistic in-house sales and marketing targets. Staff were incentivised to open as many accounts for their customers as possible, and the bank knowingly looked the other way when basic KYC protocols such as customer permission were breached.
Source: NPR In response to the scandal, Wells Fargo fired over 5,000 employees and paid over $3 billion in penalties under a settlement announced by the US Justice Department in 2020. Given the amount of damaging publicity the scandal received, it became an opportunity for banks and banking regulators around the world to review and tighten their operating practices to avoid getting caught up in a similar mess. In Nigeria however, it was treated not as a cautionary tale, but as inspiration for a potentially even bigger brewing scandal.
From May 2022 for example, hundreds of tweets like this began appearing:
Apparently, to celebrate the 5th anniversary of Wema Bank’s digital banking division ALAT, the bank had set a target for its sales team that could either be described as quite ambitious or entirely insane, depending on which side of the fence you stand on. The target, the bank said, was to open 1 million new accounts in one day. For reference, Nigeria had about 134 million bank accounts in 2021, which meant that Wema wished to increase this number by almost 1 percent in just 24 hours.
Even more incredibly, when the bank would later go on to announce that it actually somehow achieved this target, it somehow did not raise an eyebrow.
Apart from some excellent work by Olalekan Fakoyejo of Ripples Nigeria, the potential severity of the financial crime that had just been perpetrated on thousands – possibly hundreds of thousands – of Nigerians went completely unreported. In some instances, the bank openly admitted to some of these new “customers” who raised a challenge, that they had been illegally onboarded without their knowledge and consent “because someone with their information thought they will be a good fit.”
When this particular gentleman reached out to the bank via email to pursue the issue further, he got the following response.
Putting aide the disingenuousness of claiming that a customer has nothing to be worried out because an account fraudulently opened using his identity is allegedly not linked to his Bank Verification Number (BVN), this email also failed to deal with an equally pressing issue which he reiterated below.
In other words, there is a clandestine market for private information of Nigerians that Wema Bank apparently has access to. What is more, it is not just Wema Bank. Other banks have also been accused of unauthorised account openings, but perhaps it is the example of UBA that illustrates the sheer depth of criminality and fraudulent behaviour that increasingly characterises the relationship between Nigerian banks and their customers.
This particular story is taken from a case file at the Federal High Court in Lagos, where on May 6, 2022, Justice Akintayo Aluko became the first Nigerian judge to issue a ruling against a Nigerian bank for opening an account using a customer’s identity without their knowledge and authorisation. The full case file is available here.
According to the case file, the complainant, Mr. Chiebuka Nworah received a $450 payment in March 2021. Instead of his UBA domiciliary account which he had opened with the bank in 2020 however, this payment went to a new domiciliary account that the bank had opened for him without his knowledge or permission. Upon receiving an SMS alert from the bank informing him about his new account and the $450 credited into it, he visited UBA’s head office at Marina, Lagos, demanding an explanation.
The bank’s risible explanation was that it had opened the new account for him so as to comply with the CBN’s ‘Naira 4 Dollar’ scheme which authorised banks to set up domiciliary accounts for customers that did not have them. Seeing as he already had a domiciliary account, this was clearly a nonsensical reason, but the bank refused to refund the money into his existing account or close the fraudulent account, even after he wrote to them with these demands twice.
Nworah decided to go to court, and then – coincidentally – UBA immediately sent his lawyer a letter claiming that the new account had been opened due to a “system glitch” and that the $450 had been refunded to his existing account. No bank statement or proof was provided to corroborate the alleged refund.
Delivering his ruling, Justice Aluko said:
“The content of the letter of the Respondent’s counsel dated 16/11/2021 is a further confirmation establishing the bank’s violation of the applicant’s right to privacy provided in Section 37 of the constitution. I agree with the Applicant that he is entitled to compensation in terms of damages for the Respondent’s wrongful, unjustified, unlawful and unwarranted breach and infraction of his constitutional right to privacy.”
Nworah was awarded N2,500,000 in damages against UBA, which was ordered to pay a further N100,000 in costs.
For Nworah, the story at least had a happy ending. The customer in the next story had no such luck.
Polaris Bank And The Customer Who Can’t Get An Account Statement
In 2008, Yorkshire Limited, a private company in Lagos took out a loan from Polaris Bank, which was then known as Skye Bank. The initial loan amount remains shrouded in secrecy as I was not able to get hold of the initial loan agreement. All that is known for sure is that it was a 10-figure amount, and all was going well until December 2013 when Skye Bank sent the company a confirmation of its loan balance stating that it was N4,159,319,763.53.
A few hours later on the same day, another confirmation of loan balance came in from Skye Bank with a completely different figure on it. This time, the stated loan balance left to be repaid was N5,262,074,147.09. No explanation was offered for why there was a N1.1 billion disparity.
Alarmed by the unprecedented phenomenon of a bank getting its customer’s account balance wrong by over N1.1 billion, the company requested a statement of account from Skye Bank, and this is where the “fun” started. Skye Bank did not provide the statement or give any reason why. Between 2013 and 2017, the company made several attempts to obtain a statement of account from Skye Bank – something that should normally be provided instantly after a single request.
Still, no statement was forthcoming from the bank. In October 2017, the company wrote officially to Skye Bank asking for its statement of account. Once again, Skye Bank ignored the request and offered no explanation.
Finally in December 2017, the company went through the legal route, writing the bank through its legal consultants, Wiseview Legal Consultancy to demand for its statement of accounts. Once again, there was radio silence from Skye Bank. Finally Yorkshire Limited went to court, obtaining a ruling from the Federal High Court in Lagos on April 17, 2018 ordering Skye Bank to provide the requested statement of account immediately.
Still Skye Bank refused to produce the requested statement, despite this clearly being a violation of a court order. On April 19, 2 days after the court judgment, the company’s lawyers once again wrote to Skye Bank demanding that the bank comply with the court order and provide a statement of account for Yorkshire Limited. Yet again, Skye Bank responded with – nothing. No statement. No explanation. No conversation. Nothing.
On April 26, 2018, company lawyers once again wrote to Skye Bank demanding for the account statement as ordered by the court. Once again, no prizes for guessing Skye Bank’s response.
Yorkshire Limited also wrote to the CBN without getting any significant response. Out of options, the company decided to go to court a second time to get the prior ruling enforced. Instituted at the Federal High Court in Lagos on April 15, 2019, the suit sought to compel the bank (now Polaris Bank following a CBN takeover) to comply with the prior court order and produce the statement of accounts which it had been hiding since 2013.
At this time, following Skye Bank’s transformation into Polaris Bank, the Asset Management Corporation Of Nigeria (AMCON) had taken over the bank’s liabilities and assets, including its loan portfolio. Somewhere on this loan portfolio was Yorkshire Limited’s mystery loan without an account statement. In January 2019, AMCON wrote to Yorkshire informing the company that it now owned the loan. No loan balance was stated in the letter.
With Yorkshire’s case in the Federal High Court pending and heading toward another loss for Polaris Bank, a bit of “magic” suddenly took place. First in March 2020, AMCON and Polaris Bank instituted a joint motion to dispute the jurisdiction of the Court to hear the case. This infamous “technical justice” tactic is one that typically characterises Nigerian court cases and keeps cases going indefinitely.
This objection was apparently based on an amendment to the AMCON Act. The ruling by Justice T.G. Ringim which can be found here, makes for interesting reading. In the ruling, Justice Ringim ultimately agreed with the objection challenging the court’s jurisdiction, but he also confirmed that neither Polaris Bank nor AMCON had in fact, been able to substantiate their claim of Yorkshire’s indebtedness by providing any documentation to confirm the debt and its amount.
Justice Ringim did appear to contradict himself in the same ruling. According to him, AMCON’s purchase of Yorkshire’s mystery loan with Skye/Polaris Bank in 2018, as stated by AMCON was also enough fact to suggest that Yorkshire is indeed indebted to Polaris Bank – even though nobody knows how much, including apparently AMCON and Polaris Bank itself.
Yorkshire subsequently filed an appeal against the ruling, and the case remains in court. Why exactly was it so important to AMCON and Polaris Bank that Yorkshire Limited must not have access to its statement of account to find out exactly how much – if anything – it owed? What happened next provides a clue.
With the case still in court, AMCON suddenly began making rapid moves to sell 5 properties in Ikoyi, Lagos, which were used as collateral for the initial loan. Bear in mind that the very loan balance in question had remained shrouded in secrecy since 2013. Somehow, despite not knowing how much the loan balance was, AMCON knew how much was needed from the sale of 5 high-value properties to liquidate it.
This forced the company to immediately take out a “Caveat Emptor” advertorial in The Guardian newspaper of Monday, June 13, 2022, warning any prospective buyers that the properties are subject to an ongoing legal process.
So here we have a poorly run bank that offered multiple balance figures on the same account with a variance of N1.1 billion in 2013, and then spent the subsequent 9 years refusing to issue a statement of account so that the customer might confirm how much they actually owed. Having been dragged to court twice to issue the statement of account, the bank and AMCON – a government body – then teamed up to sabotage a legal process aimed at getting the bank to issue the customer a statement of account. AMCON then went into ‘omonile’ mode, trying to sell expensive properties used as collateral by the borrower with the case still in court.
The final icing on the cake? On August 2, 2022, Peoples Gazette reported that the CBN had received presidential permission to sell Polaris Bank to Auwal Gombe, a relative of former military dictator Ibrahim Babangida for a knockdown price of N40 billion, following AMCON’s N1.2 trillion rescue of the lender in 2018.
Has Yorkshire Limited been the victim of a long-standing play to help politically linked businessmen to gobble up valuable assets (such as Banana Island property) on the cheap by using a bank to basically steal them from their owners?
Only the courts will decide that now.
Hopefully.
Access Bank And The MBA Forex Inside Story
These days, Maxwell Chizi Odum is known as the criminal mastermind behind one of the biggest ponzi schemes ever conceived in Africa. He has been declared wanted by Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and his whereabouts have been unknown since 2021. Once a respected pastor and mentor, he now lives as a fugitive, albeit a rich one, possibly with a second passport and a new identity.
Things used to be very different for ‘Brother Maxwell.’ Following a fairly nondescript corporate career in the oil servicing industry, he came to prominence as a widely liked and admired pastor at the popular Believers’ Loveworld (Christ Embassy) church in Port Harcourt. It was here that he would lay the groundwork for what would become a N213bn heist.
As in so often the case in Nigeria, not many people bothered to ask how a Pentecostal pastor with no significant background in finance or investment supposedly figured out an investment secret guaranteed to make them fabulously wealthy. All they saw was that other people paid money into this thing known on the street as MBA Forex, and they came out with amazing double digit returns via an investment system that was far too complicated for anyone to really understand, even if they wanted to.
Something, something…trading strategy, something…binary forex options, something, something…cryptocurrency volatility. And then something about a matrix-based trading system, which you know, absolutely, definitely, positively was not a ponzi scheme like MMM.
Naturally, it was of course, a ponzi scheme, pretty much exactly like MMM.
Under Nigerian law, the act of soliciting for and receiving monetary deposits from the public constitutes an act of carrying on banking business which requires a banking licence from the CBN. Further, the commercial offer of any investments that promise fixed interest amounts when funds are invested for fixed periods of time is a strictly regulated activity that falls squarely under the oversight of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
MBA Forex was doing both of these regulated activities despite having no kind of regulatory approval or permission whatsoever. In fact, beyond registration with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) – which pretty much anything with a pulse and a valid ID can do without any kind of regulatory spotlight – MBA Forex was an entirely illegal operation.
The difference between MBA Forex and MMM was that while MMM tried to obfuscate its centralised nature by using individual bank accounts, MBA Forex openly accepted funds into the corporate accounts it was somehow able to open at Access Bank, Ecobank, FCMB, First Bank, GT Bank, Sterling Bank, Sun Trust Bank, UBA, Unity Bank, Union Bank and Zenith Bank – despite having exactly zero CBN and SEC authorisation. This is where the story gets interesting.
Enter a company called World Citizen Equity Partners Limited. This company, purportedly a British company that organises citizenship-by-investment for wealthy people, registered in Nigeria on March 21, 2018, a few days after MBA Forex registered on March 14, 2018. WCEP would later claim that it had nothing to do with MBA Forex prior to December 2020, but the screenshot below contradicts this. Keep this in mind because it becomes important later.
In August 2020, Maxwell Odum transferred 100 million of his shares in MBA Forex to WCEP, in a transaction that saw some familiar names take up investment positions in the ponzi scheme.
The two gentlemen mentioned in the documents above are a former House of Representatives member and a former Nigerian Ambassador to the European Union (EU) and African Union (AU) respectively. Exactly why Hon. Ahmed Aliyu Wadada and Ambassador Usman Baraya decided to buy shares in a ponzi scheme remains unclear.
In December 2020, MBA Forex met the inevitable fate of all ponzi schemes, and thousands of Nigerians were thrown into mourning as their dreams of making it rich went up in smoke. Over the next few weeks and months, court orders and regulatory actions began rolling in to freeze accounts and potentially reimburse investors. Access Bank, which had hosted the majority of funds harvested by MBA Forex and Maxwell Odum, was front and centre of the investigation.
The bank however, decided to conceal the true role it played in aiding and abetting the ponzi scheme. In a sworn statement provided through its lawyer, the bank claimed that it had closed all the offending accounts as soon as it was told to, and that in any case, the main MBA Forex account had just a little over N200,000 left inside it. In an effort to hide the central role it played in enabling Maxwell Odum to get away with the scam, Access Bank also lied under oath, stating that World Citizen Equity Partners (Respondent 10) never had an account with the bank.
An affidavit sworn by Dickson Ukaha, a former Access Bank customer relationship manager in Port Harcourt directly contradicted this account of events. In his sworn statement, Ukaha stated that not only did WCEP maintain an account with Access Bank, but several transfers worth hundreds of million of naira – the sort that normally raise every AML red flag in the bank – were made from the MBA Forex account to the WCEP account months before the purported sale by Maxwell Odum.
So here we have a bank that knowingly enabled an illegal investment scheme without CBN or SEC licenses to fleece customers of billions of naira, and then lied under oath afterward to cover up the extent of its involvement in the MBA Forex fiasco. My source informed me that not only did Access Bank lie about not maintaining a WCEP account, but the account is very much active. Just to be sure, I asked for the account details and did a little test transaction to see if it would check out. And sure enough…
Enough said, I think.
Terror Financing And A Shadowy Charity From Qatar
“Abd Al-Rahman al-Nu’aym or Abderrahman Al Nuaimi is a Qatari human rights advocate and co-founder of the Alkarama human rights NGO. He previously taught Islamic Studies at Qatar University, and once served as President of the Qatar Football Association, as well as having been a board member of Qatar Islamic Bank.”
Or that’s what it says on the first 2 lines of his Wikipedia page anyway.
The next line continues, “He has been accused of being “one of the world’s most prolific terrorist financiers.”
Abd al-Rahman bin ‘Umayr al-Nu’aymi | Source: The Reference “Accused” is one way to put it.
A 2016 sanctions summary issued by the UN Security Council provides more context about exactly what this guy is about. The statement reads in part:
“In 2013, ‘Abd al-Rahman bin ‘Umayr al-Nu’aymi ordered the transfer of nearly $600,000 to Al-Qaida (QDe.004) via an Al-Qaida representative in Syria, Abu-Khalid al Suri (deceased), and intended to transfer nearly $50,000 more. Al-Nu’aymi has facilitated significant financial support to Al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI) (QDe.115), and served as an interlocutor between AQI leaders and Qatar-based donors. Al-Nu’aymi reportedly oversaw the transfer of over $2 million per month to AQI for a period of time. In mid-2012, Al-Nu’aymi provided approximately $250.000 for distribution to Harakaat al-Shabaab al-Mujahidiin leaders Hassan Dahir Aweys and Mukhtar Robow, and intended to provide additional funding.”
Al Nuaimi has been designated a Global Terrorist by the US Treasury Department for extensively funding Al-Qaida activities in Syria, Iraq, and he is also linked to terror financing as far afield as Egypt and Somalia.
He is on a global sanctions list reserved for the most dangerous global terrorists, subjecting him to an assets freeze, travel ban and arms embargo under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter.
Lagos State University, LASU Job Recruitment | 7 Positions
LASU Recruitment: Available Positions & Requirements
About LASUAssociate Professor (Religions and Peace Studies)
QualificationsCandidates must be holder of Ph.D. in relevant discipline with Eight (8) years Post-Doctoral qualification experience in teaching / research.
Candidates must have a minimum of Ten (10) years teaching and research experience in a University System or relevant Institution.
Specialization in Church History
Candidates must possess some years of post-qualification teaching and research experience in a University with several scholarly publications, administrative experience and demonstrate the ability to provide academic leadership.
Salary Structure
The University adopts the Consolidated University Academic Salary Structure (CONUASS).Lecturer II (Human Kinetics, Sports and Health Education)
QualificationsCandidates must possess PhD in Sports Administration / Sports Management with a minimum of Three (3) years of teaching and research experience.
Candidates must have a minimum of Five (5) publications in recognized journals or local and international repute.
Salary Structure
The University adopts the Consolidated University Academic Salary Structure (CONUASS).Assistant Lecturer (Human Kinetics, Sports and Health Education)
QualificationsCandidates must possess a Master’s Degree in Sports Administration / Sports Management with evidence of considerable teaching and research potential/experience.
Candidates for the position must have a CGPA of 3.5/out of 5.0 Grade Point that will enable such persons to undertake a PhD. Programme upon appointment while Candidates are already on PhD. Programme outside the University will have to run such programme on a Part-Time basis upon appointment.
Salary Structure
The University adopts the Consolidated University Academic Salary Structure (CONUASS).Associate Research Professor
Unit: Centre for Environmental Studies and Sustainable DevelopmentQualifications
Candidates must possess a PhD in a relevant discipline
Candidates must have at least Eight (8) years Post-Doctoral teaching and research experience in a University system or relevant institution.
Candidates must have a minimum of Ten (10) years of teaching and research experience in a University system or relevant institution.
Candidates must demonstrate dear evidence of scholarship through considerable academic publications, at least Twenty-Five (25), in recognized journals of local and international repute, which must be in their area of specialization.
Salary Structure
The University adopts the Consolidated University Academic Salary Structure (CONUASS).Senior Research Fellow
Unit: Centre for Environmental Studies and Sustainable DevelopmentQualifications
Candidates must possess a Ph.D in a relevant discipline.
Candidates must have at least six (6) years Post-Doctoral teaching and research experience
Candidates must have a minimum of Eight (8) years of teaching and research experience in a University system or relevant Institution.
Candidates for the position of Senior Research Fellow must demonstrate clear evidence of scholarship through considerable academic publications, at least Fifteen (15), in recognized journals of local and international repute which must be in their area of specialization.
Salary Structure
The University adopts the Consolidated University Academic Salary Structure (CONUASS).Research Fellow I
Unit: Centre for Environmental Studies and Sustainable DevelopmentQualifications
Candidates must possess a Ph.D in a relevant discipline
Candidates must have at least Three (3) years Post-Doctoral teaching and research experience
Candidate must have a minimum of Five (5) publications in recognized journals of local and International repute.
Salary Structure
The University adopts the Consolidated University Academic Salary Structure (CONUASS).Research Fellow II
Unit: Centre for Environmental Studies and Sustainable DevelopmentQualifications
Candidates must possess a Ph.D in a relevant discipline with evidence of teaching and research experience / potential.
Candidate must have a minimum of Three (3) publications in recognized journals of local and International repute.
Salary Structure
The University adopts the Consolidated University Academic Salary Structure (CONUASS).How to Apply for LASU Jobs
Interested and qualified candidates should forward Thirty (30) copies of detailed Applications, including photocopies of credentials (O’ Level Result inclusive). The Curriculum Vitae should be presented in the following order:Name in Full with Surname first (Boldly Written)
Place and Date of Birth
State of Origin
Permanent Address
Current Postal Address
Nationality
Marital Status
Number and Ages of Children
Academic / Professional Qualifications (with dates and institutions)
Statement of Experience including full details of former and present position
Current Research
List of Publications
Other activities outside current employment
Name, Address and Telephone Numbers of three (3) referees
Telephone and E-mail Address (Self)
Proposed date of availability for duty if appointed.
Candidates should please include Three (3) self-addressed envelopes with Stamp of Fifty Naira (N50:00) only on each. All applications with supporting documents should be addressed and submitted to:
The Registrar,
Lagos State University,
Badagry Expressway, Ojo,
P. M. B. 0001, Lagos State University,
Post Office, Ojo,
Lagos State.Note: Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.
Deadline: 16th August, 2022.
Has LASUED Released Admission Cut-off For 2022/2023?
What is the cutoff mark for LASUED?
What is the cut-off mark for Lagos State University Of Education?
Following the announcement of the cut-off marks for the 2022/2023 academic session admission exercise by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), the management of the Lagos State University of Education (LASUED) announced the cut-off mark that would be required for admission into its various degree programs.
Lagos State University of Education (LASUED) wishes to bring to the notice of the general public and especially its protective students that its cut-off mark for the 2022/2023 admission exercise is 150.
Registration and screening exercises will be communicated to the public soon.
What Is ABUAD Screening Date For the 2022/2023 Session?
ABUAD Post UTME Screening Exercise
This inform prospective students of Afe Babalola University that the 1st Batch PostUTME Screening Exercise will take place on August 6th, 2022.
What Is ABUAD Screening Date For the 2022/2023 Session?
The Post-UMTE screening for the 2022/2023 Admission Session will be conducted online utilising our Computer-Based Screening Platform, in accordance with the practice of social distancing as well as other government instructions on the fight against the transmission of the Covid-19 virus. The web platform is basic and easy to use.
Please keep in mind that before you may access the Post-UTME Screening Platform, you must have paid for the Admission Form online and completed your Online Application Form.
The Screening Exercise Step-By-Step Guidelines can be found here.
In due course, the admission status will be made visible on the web.
NB
If you paid for and filled out the application form by hand, please scan it and email it to postutmescreeningtest@abuad.edu.ng. This must include your payment evidence, valid email address, and phone number.
If you have not yet begun the application process, go to https://admissions.abuad.edu.ng/docs/step by-step guide adm.pdf to examine the Online Application Process instructions.
What Is ABUAD Screening Date For 2022/2023 Session?
How to Apply for ABUAD Post UTME / Undergraduate Admission Screening
ONLINE APPLICATION FOR UNDERGRADUATEClick on http://admission.abuad.edu.ng/to fill the online form and make an online payment.
If the application is made online, then, you have the opportunity to write your POST UTME TEST ONLINE.Download the Application Form Online on the University Website: abuad.edu.ng
You can also purchase forms at the designated Centres listed below.If the application is made through options (2) and (3), then you will not have the opportunity to do your POST UTME TEST ONLINE BUT AT A DESIGNATED CENTRE AND DATE.
PURCHASE OF ADMISSION APPLICATION FORMCandidate who chose ABUAD in the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) are to pay the sum of N2,000 for Admission Application Form and N5,000 as Screening Fee into any of the under-listed Banks with ABUAD Undergraduate Account Number while Direct Entry and Inter-University Transfer application forms is N10,500 each which is to be paid to same under-listed Banks.
CHANGE OF INSTITUTIONCandidates who did not choose Afe Babalola University (ABUAD) in the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) are also qualified to participate in the Post UTME screening by purchasing a change of institution form from the University at a cost of N3,500 which is in addition to the N2,000 for Admission Application Form and N5000 as Screening Fee from any of the under-listed banks. Please note that a Change of Institution form from JAMB is also a requirement.
Candidates awaiting SSCE results or its equivalent can also apply for admission provided they qualify when results are available.
DESIGNATED BANK ACCOUNTS FOR UNDERGRADUATE ADMISSION FORMUnion Bank Plc – 0061954679
Fidelity Bank Plc – 5080051231
Sterling Bank Plc – 0064784459
WEMA Bank Plc – 0122718841
DESIGNATED SELLING POINTS OF UNDERGRADUATE FORMSONLINE ON http://admission.abuad.edu.ng/
MAIN CAMPUS: AFE BABALOLA UNIVERSITY [ABUAD], ADO-EKITI, KM 8.5, AFE BABALOLA WAY, ADO-EKITI, EKITI STATE.
IBADAN OFFICE, EMMANUEL CHAMBERS: 80, FAJUYI ROAD EKOTEDO, IBADAN.
ABUJA OFFICE: EMMANUEL HOUSE, 24, MADEIRA STREET, IMANI ESTATE, MAITAMA, ABUJA.
LAGOS OFFICE: EMMANUEL HOUSE, PLOT 1, BLOCK 4, CMD/JUBILEE ROAD, MAGODO GRA, LAGOS.
PORT-HARCOURT OFFICE: EMMANUEL CHAMBERS, NO 43, WOGU STREET D/LINE, PORTHARCOURT, RIVERS STATE.
WARRI: MONTESSORI INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL, 66, AIRPORT ROAD, OPPOSITE DELTA CAREER COLLEGE, WARRI.
NOTE: Bank Tellers or proof of payments are to be presented at the designated selling centers for collection of Application Forms. Application Forms will also be available on the day of screening at the Screening Centre.
INTERNATIONAL APPLICANTSNB: International Applicants are required to forward their academic transcripts to the following email addresses;
reg _christieoluborode@abuad.edu.ng
admissioninfo@abuad.edu.ng
FOR FURTHER ENQUIRIESVisit http://abuad.edu.ng or send an email to admissioninfo@abuad.edu.ng OR
Send a letter to the Office of the Registrar, Afe Babalola University [ABUAD], Ado-Ekiti. OR
Call the following numbers: 08127772121, 08152970484, 08152970475, 09011673845, 09011574312, and 08033509150.UNILAG makes history, signs training agreement with Nord
..To build first African auto plant in the varsity
HISTORY was made yesterday, at the University of Lagos as the university signed a Memorandum of Agreement with an indigenous auto company, Nord Motors, for practical training of willing and qualified students of the school in the act of assembling of cars, repair, service and maintenance of automobiles.
Speaking at the MOA signing ceremony, UNILAG Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Oluwatoyin Ogundipe, said it was the first time such type of collaboration between the university and an automobile company in Nigeria would be sealed.
He described it as a Triple Elite Model by bringing the government, the industry and university together.
What we are doing today is innovation Triple Elite Model in which we are bringing the industry to the campus. This should be the first time this type of thing will be happening in the university in Africa. This will be a great opportunity for our students in different departments to contribute to the development of automobile in Nigeria.”
According to him, education has gone beyond dishing out theory to the students, adding that there is an absolute need for the practical application of the studies “so that our students will be able to do their IT in and outside the university. Whatever they are able to learn, they will apply it in other areas.
This can give rise to the evolution of having a department of automobile engineering in the University of Lagos.”
Prof Ogundipe stated that the university had in abundance experts in relevant departments to support the project in the area of research and cognitive development.
He commended the Nord team for the initiative and congratulated the university’s council, members of staff and students as well as all the stakeholders associated with UNILAG for the feat and past achievements
The Chief Executive of Nord Motors, Mr Oluwatobi Ajayi, said the initiative could be the beginning of industrial revolution in Nigeria, where students would not only see how vehicles are made but be part of the production process.
“By this time in two months, you will be seeing a beautiful showroom and a working assembly plant on the UNILAG campus.”
He stressed that Nigerians need to show the world that “we are not just consumers of good things but creators of good things.”
Ajayi said having worked in some of the biggest auto industries in the world before starting the Nord company, he felt compelled to give the best to the country and allow willing young Nigerians to get the practical experience about auto making and business.
“Our vehicles are of international standard but 40 per cent lower in prices than what is sold elsewhere,” he said.
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, (Development Services) at UNILAG, Prof. Ayodele Atsenuwa, had earlier given the background of the project.
She recalled having the CEO of Nord Motors, Mr Ajayi, as one of the judges at an innovative engineering event with potential investors at the UNILAG last year, where he expressed interest in the quality of presentations that the students who pitched put forward.
She said, “From there, we started to talk. We said we would like our students studying mechanical engineering to come as interns to Nord Motors to have hands-on experience.
Nord in its reply said if we do not mind they could put up a work station on our campus to enable the students to learn practically the business of automobile.
“We have put together a Memorandum of Agreement with details of how we will partner Nord Motors to the benefit of the faculty and the students.
“Under the agreement, we have the following objects: to facilitate and develop a platform for willing and qualified students of UNILAG in the act of manufacturing and assembling of cars in conjunction with Nord Motors; create a skill development drive of resolving unemployment crisis among youths that are employable to develop a career way with Nord Motors; to create a situation where UNILAG can play in the value chain in the car manufacturing business in Nigeria.
; to create an opportunity to train at least 15 students annually in the University of Lagos to study and acquire automobile skills at no cost; to provide automobile services, maintenance at the UNILAG for the staff and students at discounted prices, among other things.”
According to her, the project will be a major step towards achieving university-industry collaboration for the benefit of the the country.
Unilag Alumni Association, Lagos State branch has projected a total of N408.5million in scholarships to outstanding indigent students and First Class students in 4th-6th year courses in the ivory tower.
While N348million will go to 500 indigent students, N60.5million will be given in scholarships to 100 students with 4.5 and above GPA.
The association also listed some prominent Nigerians including Minister of Communication, Barrister Adebayo Shittu for awards. The chairman of the association, Dr Lukman Adeoti, stated this during a press briefing heralding the AGM/Annual alumni week of the association held at the Afe Babalola auditorium, University of Lagos, Akoka, recently.
Dr Adeoti while rolling out the achievements of the association, stated that the group has secured 10 hectares of land at Owode, Obafemi, Ogun State and will continue to support students at various levels in order to achieve academic excellence.
He thanked governor Akinwunmi Ambode for his support while also calling on well meaning Nigerians to identify with its programmes tagged ‘Support Our University Projects’, SOUP such as Indigent Students and scholarship awards; Academic Excellence and Professional project where the association organises seminars to help under-achievers students in Third Class and probation as well as Skill Acquisition Training/Entrepreneurial development programme. As part of the week-long activities, Special Jumaat Prayers will be held at the university Central Mosque today while special Thanksgiving has been slated for Sunday at the UNILAG Chapel.
The event will climax on Sunday with the AGM, election of new officers and Award night. -Prominent among the awardees are Prof Oluwatoyin Ogundipe, FAS, Vice Chancellor of the institution who will be honoured with Distinguished University Administrator Award; Chief Henry Oladele Ajomale, Chairman, All Progressive Congress, APC, Lagos, will be receiving Distinguished Democratic Leadership Award; Babatunde Fowler, Chairman Tax Board will be given Tax Legend Award; Minister of Communication, Barrister Adebayo Shittu, for Innovation in Information and Communication Skill Award; the chairman Police Service Commission, Dr. Mike Okiro among many other distinguished Nigerians
Doctors at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, Ikeja, are battling to save the life of a civil servant in the state, identified only as Mistura, after she was allegedly attacked by her maid in the Ejigbo area.
PUNCH Metro learnt that Mistura had been in a coma since Monday, March 5, 2018, when she was attacked with blended pepper and a wine bottle by the maid, identified as Susan Samson.
Our correspondent was told that despite a three-hour surgery on Wednesday, the victim had yet to come round and was in the intensive care unit of LASUTH.
It was learnt that Mistura, who taught in a public secondary school in Lagos, had employed Samson on February 4, 2018 to assist her with domestic chores.
The 18-year-old suspect was reported to have stolen her boss’ money last Friday and Saturday.
After the stolen money was recovered from Samson’s bag, Mistura was said to have alerted the agent who brought her.
The Ogoja, Cross River State indigene, in a desperate bid to escape from the house, which Mistura had locked, allegedly poured blended pepper on the boss while she lay on the bed.
She then grabbed a champagne bottle and smashed it on the victim’s head repeatedly until she passed out
The suspect was reportedly apprehended by residents who heard the victim’s scream for help.
PUNCH Metro was told that the suspect was handed over to policemen from the Ejigbo division.
The victim’s husband, who identified himself only as Alhaji Sikiru, said he had gone to work when the incident happened.
He said, “An agent brought her to my wife on February 4, 2018. The girl said although she was from Ogoja, Cross River State, she had her primary and secondary education in Ikorodu, Lagos State, where she had lived the better part of her life.
“I had gone to work around 6am on Monday when my wife was attacked. But when I was called, I went to make a statement at the Ejigbo Police Station where the girl was being detained. That was where she told me everything that happened.
“She said last Friday, my wife accused her of stealing some money. Again on Saturday, there was an allegation she stole another money. I was surprised because my wife did not tell me that the maid she employed was stealing her things.
“After I left the house on Monday, my wife asked her to buy balm for her down the street. While she was away, my wife went to her room and found the stolen money in her bag, including some other items which she (Samson) stole from her shop.
“My wife called the agent that brought her and asked him to come over to the house. The agent immediately called the girl to know what happened. The girl said she didn’t know why she (Mistura) called him.
“At this time, she had become suspicious. So, when she got back to the house, she went to her bag and discovered that the stolen money and other items had been recovered by my wife.”
He said Mistura, while awaiting the agent, locked up the two gates in the house and kept the keys.
She was said to have lain on the bed.
“When the girl saw that her secret was about to be exposed, she wanted to escape. On discovering that the pedestrian and drive gates had been locked, she became desperate.
She went to the kitchen, took a bowl of blended pepper, and poured it on my wife on the bed. My wife could not see again, but she groped to the main gate. She started calling for help because she could not also open the gate.
“The girl went inside the house and found a bottle of champagne, which I had kept for an occasion. She smashed it on my wife’s head five times. And she collapsed.
Some residents, who had gathered outside the gate after hearing my wife’s call for help, caught her as she tried to escape. They also found my wife in a pool of blood and rushed her to a hospital,” he added.
He noted that during a visit of the police to the house, they found more stolen items in the suspect’s room.
Alhaji Sikiru, while expressing fear over the condition of his wife, said he hoped she would make it out alive.
“She lost a lot of blood and I had to get six pints of blood yesterday (Tuesday). Because her blood level was low, the doctors gave her four pints so she could go through a surgery which started from 1am and ended around 4.30am on Wednesday. The surgery didn’t bring out anything. She is still in a coma.
My wife is in the intensive care unit of LASUTH. Her brain has collapsed and has been removed from the body and kept somewhere. Her kidney is already packing up. I hope she makes it out alive,” he added.
A source told PUNCH Metro that the couple had a disagreement late 2017 over the issue of getting a maid as the husband was against the idea
The source said the dispute was so intense that some relatives had to wade in.
“The woman has high blood pressure and her personal doctor told the husband in January that the woman’s BP was still high but she said she would be better if he allowed her to have a maid. That was when the man succumbed. But see what it has caused,” she said.
The state Police Public Relations Officer, SP Chike Oti, said it was a case of attempted murder.
He said, “The said Susan Samson suspected that her boss had discovered some items she stole and hid in her room. She subsequently mixed a large quantity of pepper in water and poured it on the woman’s face to render her defenceless.
She subsequently hit her head repeatedly with a big bottle of wine which grievously harmed the woman. The state Commissioner of Police, Edgal Imohimi, has decried this act wickedness and ordered a thorough investigation and diligent prosecution of the case.”
The Chief Medical Director of LASUTH, Professor Wale Oke, said the victim was receiving treatment at the hospital.
He said, “She had a surgery yesterday, which was successful. She is, however, not out of the woods yet. She is still in a coma. We have to wait for the brain to heal from the injuries.”
Topic: FACTS ABOUT NIGERIA
1. Nigeria is home to about seven percent (7%) of the total languages spoken in the world. Did you know that Taraba state alone has more languages than 30 African countries?
2. There are more than 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria. Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo are the largest tribes in Nigeria.
3. The largest river in the whole of West Africa is River Niger. The river flows into the Atlantic through the Gulf of Guinea and cuts off the predominantly Igbo states in the south east from some of her sister states in the Niger Delta.
4. The name Nigeria is derived from River Niger.
5. Nigeria is one of the oldest location of human existence. The Nok civilization is the first civilization in this part of the world (around 500 BC – 200 AD).
6. It is believed that the world’s largest diversity of butterflies can be found in the areas surrounding Calabar in Cross Rivers state, Nigeria
7. The longest bridge in Africa is the Third Mainland Bridge, Lagos. The bridge is 11.8 km long.
8. The Yoruba tribe has the highest rate of twin births in the world
9. In Edo state Nigeria, there is an ancient wall at over 16000km long, which is about 2 times the length of the Great Walls of China. The walls (800-1400AD), are the longest ancient earthworks in the world.
10. The Jos Plateau Indigobird, a small bird, reddish-brown in color, is found nowhere else on the planet but Plateau state, Nigeria.
11. The second largest delta on the planet is located in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria
12. Nigeria country is also the 7 most populous nation in the world.
13. The Nigerian Currency – Naira was introduced in 1959
14. The Northern Part of Nigeria is four times larger than the size of the whole of southern Nigeria. The north has a land mass of 719000 sq. km.
15. There are Muslims in Nigeria than there are in the Saudi Arabia
16. The NYSC (National Youth Service Corps) was launched in 1973
17. Nollywood Nigeria is the second largest movie producer in the world after Bollywood of India.
18. Nigeria became a republic on the 1 of October 1963
19. The anambra waxbill bird is found only in Southern Nigeria and nowhere else in the world.
20. The first Nigerian Nobel Laureate is Professor Wole Soyinka
21. The first African to win miss world beauty was Agbani Darego. She was a Nigerian University undergraduate then.
22. There has been 6 coups in Nigeria. The highest number of coups in African countries.
23. The Biafran war (Nigerian civil war) lasted between July 1967 to January 1970.
24. Nigeria has a total area of 923,768 km
25. Nigeria is the 32 largest country in the world in terms of landmass.
26. The 2 major rivers in Nigeria (River Niger and River Benue) meet at Lokoja, Lokoja state, Nigeria.
27. Lagos is the largest city in Africa
28. Nigeria shares border with Chad, Niger, Benin, Cameroon
29. Nigeria was the first African country to eradicate Ebola disease.The management of Lagos State University (LASU) has published the Batch C names of candidates admitted into its postgraduate programme for the 2017/2018 Academic Session.
The list of available candidates are available on the school’s website.
The names of admitted candidates are contained on the attached pdf document;
You can view this directly or download on a PDF enabled device to view.
