- As Niger gov, Andy Uba, Gobir, 107 others are named in PanamaPapers reports
A Federal High Court in Lagos on Thursday dismissed a suit filed 10 years ago by Honeywell Group and its chairman, Dr. Oba Otudeko, seeking to eject billionaire businessman, Alhaji Aliko Dangote and his companies, from a piece of land known as Fifth Apapa Wharf Extension in Lagos.
The said land, measuring over 10.841 square metres, is located at the Lagos Ports Complex.
Otudeko and his company had urged the court to sack Dangote and his companies from the land and to award $48m against the defendants in their favour.
But in a judgment delivered on Thursday, 10 years after the suit was filed, Justice Okon Abang decided that Otudeko’s suit lacked merit and thus dismissed it.
Apart from Dangote, the other defendants in the suit are the Nigeria Ports Authority, the Bureau of Public Enterprises, Dangote Industries Ltd, Dangote and Greenview Development Ltd.
The judge said contrary to the plaintiffs’ claim, he found no illegality in the manner Dangote acquired the land through an agent.
“It is my view that the second defendant lawfully granted the concession with the approval of the then head of state to the agent of Dangote,” Justice Abang held.
He declared that Otudeko failed to show any evidence that he suffered any loss to merit the $48m damages he was asking for.
He held, “As regards the monetary claims sought for by the plaintiff, My Lords, the plaintiff has not called evidence to justify the award of either special or general damages in this matter. I so hold.”
The judge, however, ordered Otudeko to pay a cost of N50,000 to each of the four defendants.
“The suit of the plaintiff lacks merit and is hereby dismissed with a cost of N50,000 awarded in favour of first and second defendant, and again the cost of N50,000 awarded in favour of the third to fifth defendant payable by the plaintiff,” the judge held.
Otudeko and his companies had, in their suit, claimed that NPA leased the land to them for five years for a bulk food handling facility at N2.168m per year. It said it paid the sum, as well as N290, 000 for land survey.
Honeywell said it took possession of the land to the defendants’ knowledge and conducted technical studies on the facility, spending millions of dollars in the process.
The plaintiff said despite being aware of its massive development plans on the land, the BPE suddenly suspended the pre-existing rights by concessioning NPA’s Apapa Ports Complex, including the Fifth Apapa Wharf Extension to Greenview, owned by Dangote.
In the meantime, at least 110 Nigerian individuals and companies, including Governor Abubakar Sadiq Bello of Niger State, Senators Andy Ubah and Ibrahim Gobir have so far been identified in the leaked PanamaPapers to operate offshore shell companies in tax havens.
Senate President, Bukola Saraki, and his predecessor, Senator David Mark, among several other Nigerians had earlier been identified in the document. The list, which also contained top business persons, politicians, and their family members, detailed names of companies, their owners and the particular tax havens the offshore firms are domiciled.
An online publication, Premium Times, which revealed the list, is the only Nigerian media organisation with exclusive access to the documents obtained by German newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) with over 80 media organisations around the world.
Since April 3, 2016, when the news of the unprecedented leak broke worldwide, the publication had published series of exclusive reports about the offshore assets of prominent Nigerians named in the database that is now globally referred to as #PanamaPapers. Some of them, who are public officer holders, held the assets in violation of Nigerian law, failing to declare them to the Code of Conduct Bureau.
The investigation revealed the assets of some of Nigeria’s most powerful individuals, including Africa’s richest man Aliko Dangote; President of the Senate, Bukola Saraki; the boss of Oando, Nigeria’s biggest indigenous oil firm, Wale Tinubu, in tax havens such as the British Virgin Islands, Panama, and Seychelles. The unprecedented year-long investigation involving 11.5 million secret documents, which stretch from 1977 to December 2015, exposed the hidden underground of the world economy, a network of banks, law firms and other middlemen that utilize shell companies, sometimes using them to hide illegal wealth.
The 2.6 TB files, involving 214,488 entities, also revealed hundreds of details about how former gun-runners, contractors and other members of the spy world use offshore companies for personal and private gain.
The investigation unveiled the cloak of secrecy provided by Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm that specializes in creating offshore companies, some of which had been used by con men and women to hide Ponzi schemes, predatory lending scams, and other financial frauds from their victims and from the authorities.
Contacted for his reactions, Gobir, who is Senate Committee on Senate Services, was said to have travelled out to Saudi Arabia for lesser hajj. His Media Assistant, Bala Kassim, said his boss left the country yesterday, adding that there was no way he could be reached for responses to the allegation.
On his part, Vanguard sent text messages to the three lines of the Chairman, Senate Committee on Public Accounts, Senator Andy Uba, PDP (Anambra South) to comment on allegations, but there were no responses. Also, efforts made last night to reach Governor Bello and the two senators proved abortive as calls made to their mobile phones remained unanswered.
Upshot with additional report from Vanguard