• ‘Officer handling case transferred for rejecting bribe from suspects’
Businessman, Austin Ugochukwu Albert, has petitioned President Muhammadu Buhari over alleged poor handling of a $1million ( N360 million) fraud case he lodged with the Police.
He said he paid N360 million in exchange for $1million, which he never got.
He said he was suspecting compromise, abuse of office and corrupt activities by some officers assigned to investigate how he was swindled of the $1million.
He blamed some officers in the Inspector-General of Police monitoring unit of compromise.
He alleged that he suspected a corrupt deal of about $200,000 to frustrate his complaint to the police.
He said the officer handling his case was transferred in a suspicious manner at the prompting of one of the influential suspects, who defrauded him.
He said he could not understand why the officer was redeployed midway into a crucial investigation in which he had recovered $205,000.
In a petition through his counsel, Ugochukwu Ezekiel, he urged President Muhammadu Buhari to direct the Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, to return his case to the Force Intelligence Unit instead of the Monitoring Unit.
He said he paid N360 million with intent to source for $1million for his business.
But after successfully remitting the N360 million, a group of five suspects involved in the transaction refused to give him the $1million.
He said: “Our client first reported the matter at Area J Command of the Nigeria Police Force, Ajah, Lagos State, where the suspects made confessional statements that the entire transaction was a fraud but at this point they all refused to give up their kingpin; Bakare.
“The matter was later transferred to Zone 2 Command of the Nigeria Police Force, Lagos on the orders of the Assistant Inspector General of Police, who equally ordered that all accounts already frozen by the Police pursuant to their investigation activities be unfrozen. Our client was dissatisfied and wrote a petition to the Inspector General of Police.
“Unfortunately, the officers that investigated the matter at Inspector General of Police monitoring unit compromised the matter, refused to arrest the kingpin, who had been identified as Bakare.
“They hurriedly charged the matter to a Magistrate Court in Abuja, which to their knowledge, has no jurisdiction to entertain the matter.
“The suspects were subsequently set free on ridiculous bail conditions and this emboldened them as they called our client and demanded that our client should not pursue the matter anymore or he would be eliminated.
“To forestall the materialisation of their threat, our client wrote a fresh petition to the Deputy Inspector General of Police, Force Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Department and the matter was assigned to the Force Intelligence Bureau for investigation.
“On learning of the embarrassing situation, the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Inspector General of Police monitoring unit quickly transferred the case file to the Force Intelligence Bureau for a review and unbiased investigation..
“Our client must confess that the Force Intelligence Bureau acted professionally and intelligently and within weeks rounded up the suspects and obtained an order from the Federal High Court to have them detained pending investigation.
“We are aware that the head of Force Intelligence Bureau was offered some huge amount of money as bribe and he turned it down.
“To our client’s utter consternation, our client got information that Bakare was boasting while still in detention that he has offered the money that was rejected by men of Force Intelligence Bureau to some officers in the Monitoring Unit and that the case will not only be taken away from that department but the head of that unit, who he described as very strict, will be removed.
“Our client treated this as the joke of the century and moved on. However, less than 24 hours after our client got the information, the Inspector General of Police sent a signal that the case file be transferred to another unit and that the officer be immediately transferred.”
The businessman urged the President to use his “good offices to ensure that the case is returned to the Force Intelligence Unit and the honest officer unduly removed be reinstated to that unit”.
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