Muftau Zakari, a resident of Ibadan, has accused Wema Bank of disbursing N7 million from his late father’s accounts to faceless individuals and non-existing corporate entities created by four lawyers to steal from his father.

The Ibadan resident also accused Wema Bank of nonchalance, as the bank did not contact anyone from his family before paying out his father’s money to those who conspired to steal from him.

Zakari told FIJ that the issue had lingered for a while but the family was not aware of it until 2022 because there had been some sort of dispute that prevented them from sharing their father’s property.

He said the family obtained a letter of administration in 2022 to obtain his late father’s money, but upon doing so, they discovered that four lawyers had used a fake lawsuit to obtain money from his account.

THE GENESIS

Zakari said that Alhaji Hamidu Zakari, his father, was supposed to have N11 million in his Wema Bank account prior to his death in 2015.

He said in 2022, the Zakari family instructed Lanre Shittu, their lawyer, to obtain a letter of administration from the Customary Court of Appeal Probate Registry, Ibadan, for the family to have access to Zakari’s money and share it among themselves.

However, in the process of obtaining the letter of administration, the family discovered that the sum of N7,963,170 had been taken out of the N11,862,759 in the account on June 30, 2014, while his father was still alive but ill.

Muftau said immediately after the family realised there was some sort of foul play on their father’s account, they instructed their family lawyer to write to the bank. The response of the bank, Muftau said, was stranger than fiction.

According to him, the bank’s reply to their lawyer’s inquest was that the money was withdrawn in satisfaction of a judgement.

“He also said garnishee orders were attached to the correspondence that the bank sent to us through our solicitor,” said Muftau.

Muftau said that upon further investigation by his family’s lawyer, they discovered that the purported garnishee orders were predicated on a 2012 lawsuit filed with the suit title ‘Mr Olufemi Jackson & Starleeds Ltd vs Akande Temitope & Access Investment Nigeria Ltd and suit No; I/971/2012’.

A FAKE LAWSUIT CREATED TO SCAM

“Our late father was never a party to this suit and never knew the parties. He was never served with any court papers in respect of this suit. We also make the bold statement that he never had any business dealings with any of the parties to this suit. Our father was unlettered, and this made us privy to all his business transactions,” he said.

He said the family’s lawyer informed them that the claimants in this suit were claiming money running into hundreds of millions owed to them by various individuals and that his father’s name appeared in the garnishee order.

He said the claimants obtained judgement to satisfy the debt being owed to them.

WEMA BANK DID NOT INFORM THE FAMILY

Muftau said he found it really perplexing that Wema Bank did not inform the family before and after the money was withdrawn from their father’s account.

He said the bank tried to explain their way out of the situation by saying that they tried to reach his father to inform him before the money was withdrawn.

Muftau said the bank’s statement holds no water because his father’s house is a short walk from the Wema Bank branch that he frequented during his lifetime.

“Our father had a next of kin that Wema Bank could have contacted. We believe that they are enablers of the individuals who stole our father’s money. Their complicity in this is obvious to everybody,” he said.

Muftau said his family instructed their lawyer to find out the names of the lawyers who filed the suit and the identities of the claimants and defendants from the correspondence that his family lawyer exchanged with Wema Bank.

FAKE LAWYERS, NON-EXISTENT COMPANIES

Muftau told FIJ that his family’s lawyer conducted a thorough search at the Corporate Affairs Commission and discovered that both the second claimant in the suit, Starleeds Ltd., and the second defendant, Access Investment Nigeria Ltd., were non-existing corporate entities.

His lawyer found that one Adebayo Awolusi, a solicitor, was given the bank draft of N7,963,170.62 for presentation to his purported judgement creditor.

“And acting upon this information, we caused a letter to be written by our lawyer to him, but it’s been crickets ever since from his end. He passed the buck to one Kolade Olubajo, who he claimed to be representing,” he said.

Muftau said the parties never showed up throughout the duration of the lawsuit, except the lawyers who acted out the charade of a suit in court.

He said the family discovered that apart from Adebayo Awolusi, who collected the draft from Wema Bank for presentation to his faceless judgement creditor, there was also Kolade Olubajo, who filed the suit on which the garnishee order was predicated.

“Also featuring prominently in the garnishee order was Babatunde Adedeji, who held the brief for Adebayo Awolusi on the day the order nisi was granted by the court presided over by Justice Aderemi (rtd.) at the High Court in Ibadan, and Adewale Oyewusi, who represented the faceless defendant and who curiously did not oppose the application for default judgement against his client in court,” he said.

“It is mindboggling indeed, how a lawyer properly so-called would not oppose an application that is averse to his client’s interest, especially when the subject matter concerns money running into hundreds of millions.”

He likened Oyewusi to the gatekeeper who opened the door for the thieves to carry out their robbery.

“Adewale Oyewusi is the enabler who acted against his purported client’s interest and conspired with other lawyers in this brazen criminal act because he stood to benefit from the proceeds of this crime,” he said.

“The four lawyers, namely Kolade Olubajo, Adebayo Awolusi, and Babatunde Adedeji, who represented the faceless judgement creditors, represented the faceless claimants who were their creations, and conspired to carry out this heist of our father’s money using the mechanism of the law, while Adewale Oyewusi represented the faceless defendants.”

He stated that Kolade Olubajo and Adewale Oyewusi fled to the United States after carrying out their criminal acts.

“We have since written a criminal petition against these unscrupulous lawyers to the Oyo State Police Command at Eleyele, Ibadan, but nothing significant has been done,” he said.

“We want to get the word out about these lawyers who have no desire to return our father’s stolen money and the attendant interest after being exposed as the criminals that they are.

“We know the interest this money would have yielded if it had been in the bank from eight years ago, when it was stolen.”

AWOLUSI’S RESPONSE

When FIJ contacted Adebayo Awolusi, one of the four lawyers involved in the matter, he said he only handled the matter for Kolade Olubajo.

 “The case was not my case. I only held the lawyer’s brief. It was the lawyer that did the case from filing up to judgement. It was at the state he wanted to garnish some accounts that he called me to assist him when he was not around. Jackson Olufemi is K. O. Olubajo’s client. He’s not mine,” he said.

There had been some correspondence between Jackson and the judgement debtor. He was the lawyer before the case went to court.

Awolusi refused to give this reporter the phone numbers of the other lawyers involved in the fraud.

WHAT THE LAW SAYS ON HOLDING BRIEF

According to thenigerianlawyer.com, holding brief is a kind of a professional arrangement between two lawyers where one lawyer is standing in temporarily for another lawyer in a case until the other lawyer is available to continue with the handling of his case personally.

In the case of MFA V INONGHA (2014) NWLR (Pt. 1397)P. 343 AT 369 the court held on the effect of holding brief practice that “when counsel announces appearance, whether as holding brief for another counsel or not, he is presumed to have full briefing and authority to do the case…” Also, the fact that a counsel holds brief of another does not mean he is stripped of the right to consider and act on legal issues arising out of the matter in which he represents a party in a court. Once in court, the presumption is that he is seized of the matter. See PRUDENT BANK PLC V OBADAKI (2012) 2 NWLR P. 50.

WEMA BANK’S RESPONSE

FIJ also contacted Wema Bank via email, but more than 14 days after, they have not responded.