IBORI: IS THERE JUSTICE IN THIS WORLD. THE weird thing about the ongoing Chief James Onanefe lbori, former governor of Delta State, assets confiscation trial saga in the Uk is that the British court presided over by Justice Anthony Pitts has on Monday 7,October,2013,come to the conclusion that there is no evidence to support Ibori’s conviction. It is a decision which a Nigerian court presided over by Justice Marcel Awokulehin had arrived at on Thursday, December 17,2009, nearly four years ago. However, the difference between the UK court and her Nigerian counterpart is that while the case was quashed in Nigeria for lack of evidence, Judge Pitts has admitted that the case lacked evidence as argued by lbori’s defence counsel in the UK ,but decided to adjourn for retrial to enable prosecution gather evidence against lbori. This decision has sent legal tongues wagging across the world because: (1)About 50 trips had been made to Nigeria in search of evidence against Ibori by Metropolitan police officer Peter Clark in a period of eight years, (2)Peter Clark, under cross examination by defence counsel has also admitted under oath that the evidence he used to convict Ibori were fabricated,(3)Both prosecution and defence had made their concluding submissions in a three-week long trial which procedurally should have been brought to a close. So what in the world justifies Judge Pitts decision to adjourn for retrial? Recall that Judge Pitts himself had pointed out the previous day that the Crown Prosecution Counsel,Sasha Wass’s argument that the case be adjourned instead of concluded as required by legal procedures was tantamount to asking a referee in a football match to move the goal post when the match is about to end. That the respected judge turned around dramatically to grant Wass’s weird request while over ruling Ibori defence counsel,Queens Counsel,QC, Ivan Krolic’s plea for a conclusive judgement is curious and at the same time ominous. Curious because the decision goes against the grain of legal procedures and ominous because it reinforces the belief in some quarters that Ibori had been targeted for jail by hook or crook by the British authorities for reasons yet unknown, particularly because the procedure being adopted by the British court smacks of working from the answer to the question. Fortuitously, Ibori’s case in the UK is poised to be a game changer if not a landmark or watershed in the annals of British legal system because if Judge Pitts’ decision to send the case back for fresh retrial is sustained,it would probably be appealed again, perhaps up to the Supreme Court level and if he grants Ibori’s counsel’s request that the charges should be quashed and dismissed as the Nigerian judge did, the Crown maybe faced with a deluge of civil suits for wrongful conviction of Ibori,his only sister Christine,his wife Nkoyo and Udoamaka, the mother of his child. The challenge of how the system would remedy the jail terms these evidently innocent people have served is obviously a dilemma which sounds more like the proverbial standing between the devil and deep blue sea. As things now stand,Nigerian judiciary with particular reference to lbori’s case ,in my view,has been more upright than the much- vaunted stellar performance of UK judiciary because both courts came to the same conclusion of not enough evidence to nail Ibori. But only the Nigerian court passed judgement without external interference by quashing the case, while the UK court appear to be equivocating through a dramatic decision to adjourn for a retrial even after admitting that the request was absurd. In my view, that is something to celebrate by the learned judge Justice Awokulehin and by extension the Nigerian judiciary that was lampooned and pooh- poohed by the vociferous social critics and human rights activists who alleged that the ‘feat’ that could not be accomplished in Nigeria was achieved in the UK. In pursuing their nefarious ambition to nail Ibori by all means, the pair of Sasha Wass and Peter Clark along with their co-travellers in Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crime Commission,EFCC, at that time , did not consider the social upheavals that jailing Ibori,wife,sister,and mother of his child would cause their victims whose kids were between ages three to15. We do not need social scientists to enlighten us on the consequential damage arising from lack of parental care for adolescent and teenage children whose parents were locked away by inefficient and vindictive judicial officials, but suffice it to say that those long suffering children may never recover from and would continue to bear the scar from the trauma of being forcefully separated from their parents at the period they needed them the most due to unjustifiable incarceration. It is obnoxious and unfathomable that an advanced democracy like the UK is involved in such horrendous subversion of justice. The errant investigators may argue that they were mislead by their investigation counterparts in Nigeria but such would be puerile because the editor of the Daily Mail in the UK would not rush to publish an article alleging that Her Majesty,the Queen of England is a lesbian or that the president of the United States of America, Barack Obama is gay without making sure about the source and veracity of the claim? So the pair of Wass and Clark have attracted public opprobrium of international dimension to the UK and ideally, they should be investigated for their roles in bringing the Crown to disrepute since Judge Pitts has heard and agreed that evidence against lbori was fabricated and as such concluded that the evidence available to him is not enough to rule against Ibori on a case that has been ongoing for eight years. Globally, the judiciary is considered the last bastion of justice for the ordinary man,and it is particularly so in the advanced societies like the UK and USA but the Ibori persecution if allowed to persist would cast aspersions on the integrity of the UK and USA judicial systems because the United Nations,UN,body in charge of Narcotics that was funding the EFCC and causing the organisation to be more loyal to paymasters in New York than the Nigerian government when it sends unverified information directly to international agencies without clearance by the Attorney General ,AG or Inspector General of Police,IGP, office as stipulated by protocol is also complicit. This is perhaps one of the negative fallouts of granting and receiving of aids from the advanced society by emerging economies.So also does the recent revelation by Wikileaks that some unsavoury reports about a former president was surreptitiously written to US authorities by a former head of EFCC testify to how dangerously compromised a nation could be if it cedes it sovereignty by allowing its agency to report directly to a foreign organisation.
Posted on: Wed, 27 Nov 2013 13:47:56 +0000
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