By Samuel Malik
Finally, after duping many residents of hundreds of millions of naira, a syndicate of fraudsters that specialises in land speculation and illegal land sales in Abuja has been smashed by operatives of the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related Offences Commission, ICPC.
The syndicate comprises mainly members of staff of the Abuja Geographic Information Systems, AGIS, the agency in charge of land administration in the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, estate agents and some land speculators.
Sources told the www.icirnigeria.org that the main kingpin of the fraudulent system, Mark Iguma, an IT staff of AGIS, who handles documentation and computation of geographic information of area council land, was recently arrested by the ICPC and has offered useful information about the operations of the syndicate.
The way the syndicate worked before the bubble burst was that land speculators seeking information about genuine lands to sell would come to Iguma who would clone the original documents of lands in the AGIS information system for them. The speculators would then peddle these documents to sell the land to unsuspecting buyers.
It was a fool proof system because when prospective buyers went to AGIS to verify the genuineness of the document, alas, it was from Iguma that they would have to do so and he would tell such buyers that the cloned documents were genuine.
Sometimes, to convince them, the crooked official would show the buyer the documents on his computer to prove that they were authentic.
The syndicate ran into trouble when a former director of the Department of State Services, DSS, was scammed by an employee of AGIS.
Aminu Bello Suleiman, who was transferred to AGIS in 2006 from the Federal Capital Territory Administration, used his position as a staff of the land administration agency, to collect the Certificate of Occupancy for a piece of land at Plot 736 at Jahi District, Abuja, belonging to Mamman Buba Lawal, a former director in the Department of State Services, who later worked at the Central Bank of Nigeria and Bank of Industry.
Lawal had bought the land from Graph Ventures Limited, the original allotee, in 2008.
In order to collect the C of O, Suleiman presented documents to AGIS purportedly originating from Graph Ventures Limited to collect the C of O.
Investigations have shown that every document he presented was forged, including the international passport and signature of one of the company’s directors, who had died since 2012.
Background
On June 24, 2008, Graph Ventures Limited, a company that was into construction and agriculture, sold its plot of land for N15million to Lawal and handed over every relevant document to him, including the power of attorney, right of occupancy and letter of authority to collect the C of O.
In 2009, the company applied to the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory for registration of a power of attorney on the land in favour of the new owner, who then began the process of getting the C of O from AGIS and going every year to pick up the bills – ground rent and right of occupancy bills.
However, on February 26, 2014, when he went to collect the latest bills for the year, he was bemused to be told that they had already been paid and the C of O collected. Stunned, Lawal wondered if there was a mix up, as he believed he was the only person with the original and appropriate documents.
“I wondered how it could be possible for that to happen when all the original documents and Letter of Authority to collect C of O have been in my possession,” he said.
He was told that a staff of AGIS, Aminu Bello Suleiman, collected the C of O. He was also shown the documents Suleiman presented for the collection, which apparently were forged.
Lawal complained to AGIS that the documents used in collecting the C of O were fake but instead of investigating the allegation of forgery against one of its staff, the agency told him that the documents were original.
In a letter dated April 28, 2014, and signed by Elogun J. Dan for the Director of Land Administration, AGIS said the C of O was released to Suleiman after it had been satisfied with the documents he presented, namely, original copy of acknowledgment letter, letter of authority signed by the two directors of the company (Raphael Kumzhi and Graham Nuhu) purportedly issued to Suleiman to collect the C of O, copy of CAC Form C07 (particulars of company directors) and certificate of Incorporation of the company, copy of data page of international passports of the two directors, a copy of drivers’ license and staff identity card of the person authorised to collect the C of O (Suleiman).
AGIS further suggested to Lawal that he contact Graph Ventures Limited for clarification, implying that the original documents had been given to Suleiman by the company.
“This is akin to concluding that a forged Ghanaian banknote (Cedi) is genuine when one has not bothered to see a genuine one in comparison,” a surprised Lawal said, wondering how AGIS came to the conclusion that the documents mentioned above were genuine.
In a letter dated June 25, 2014, Graph Ventures Limited wrote to the director of Land Administration in AGIS denying issuing any letter of authority to Suleiman for the collection of the C of O. It also confirmed that Lawal was the only person it transacted business with on the land. AGIS did nothing. It did not even reply the company’s letter.
Easy money from a near perfect scam
Immediately Suleiman collected the C of O on April 22, 2013, he wasted little time in cashing in on it. He was introduced to a buyer, Murtala Ibrahim, the Managing Director of Huuudha Real Estate and Property Limited, by a friend, Sirajo Abubakar.
On June 18, 2013, Suleiman and Ibrahim signed an agreement for the sale of the land for N50 million and Ibrahim paid a deposit of N4.5million and the land documents were released to him.
It was agreed that the remaining balance of N45.5million would be paid after the estate agent had sold the land.
Having confirmed from AGIS that the C of O was genuine, Ibrahim told Suleiman that since the document was issued in the name of Graph Ventures Limited, he would need a letter of authority from the firm to sell the land. According to him, he was only buying the land in order to resell for a profit.
About a week later, on June 26, 2013, Suleiman produced a letter from Graph Ventures Limited purportedly signed by two directors authorising Huuudah Real Estate and Property to sell its land.
With the land documents and letter of authority in hand, Ibrahim put the land up for sale and not long after, a buyer was found.
The buyer, Ndubuisi Sylvanus Igwe, who owns a company, Edeoga Nigeria Limited, had told his tenant, Nwogbo Chinedu, who is a real estate agent, that he needed a commercial land at Jahi District.
Chinedu, through two other agents, Lawan Ahmed and Suleiman Abdullahi, secured the land for Igwe and both him (Igwe) and Ibrahim agreed on a price of N70million.
On July 1, 2013, Igwe transferred the sum of N70million to Ibrahim’s Zenith Bank account and was given the land documents.
According to Ibrahim, after the transaction, the buyer (Igwe) gave him an agreement for the sale of the land to be signed by Graph Ventures Limited’s directors, which he handed over to Suleiman.
Ibrahim said Suleiman later returned the document duly signed.
Following the confirmation that the money was in his account, Ibrahim said he notified Suleiman of his intention to pay him his balance, supposedly N45.5million, and he was told to pay N10million from the amount to one Yinusa Usman Marwa.
“I paid another N30million to Aminu’s account,” Ibrahim said, adding that the total money he paid to him was N52.5million.
The two agents through whom he met the buyer, Lawan Ahmed and Suleiman Abdullahi, were each paid N1.65million as the agreed agents’ fees, Ibrahim said.
Nine days later, July 10, 2013, Graph Ventures Limited purportedly wrote a letter to the Director of Land Administration at AGIS to register a power of attorney in favour of Edeoga Nigeria Limited, Igwe’s company, the now new owner of the land.
The letter was again allegedly signed by two directors of the company.
Reincarnating the dead
Graph Ventures Limited was registered by Raphael Kumzhi and Grahman Nuhu as directors. In July 2012 Kumzhi died but our findings, however, revealed that his signature appeared at least three times on documents prepared in 2013 and all these documents emanated from Suleiman.
The first time Kumzhi’s signature appeared on a document after his death was on March 19, 2013 when Suleiman submitted a letter of authority to AGIS enabling him (Suleiman) to collect the land’s C of O.
On June 26, 2013, the dead man also signed Graph Ventures Limited’s Board Resolution authorising Huudha Real Estate and Property, which bought the land from Suleiman for N50million, to resell the land.
Not willing to allow the dead to rest in peace, Suleiman brought him back to life again to sign another document and on July 1, 2013, his signature appeared on an agreement for the sale of the land between Graph Ventures Limited and Edeoga Nigeria Limited, whose owner, Igwe, had purchased the land from Huuudha Real Estate and Property.
On July 10, 2013, Kumzhi allegedly also signed a letter to AGIS to register Power of Attorney in favour of Edeoga Nigeria Limited, the new owner of the land.
Deal gone completely sour
Satisfied that he had gotten a prime piece of land at a good price, Igwe began the process of registering a power of attorney at AGIS and that was when trouble began.
About that same period, Lawal, the real owner of the land, was expecting to pick up his C of O and decided to go pay the annual bills for the land but trouble also awaited him, as he found out that a staff of the agency had posed as a go-between for Graph Ventures Limited to collect the C of O.
When Igwe enquired why it took longer than necessary for the power of attorney to be registered, he was told that someone had petitioned the agency laying claim on the same land.
Lawal on July 3, 2014 petitioned the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission, ICPC, about what he called forgery of official documents and fraudulent collection of Certificate of Occupancy in respect of the piece of land.
In the letter, Lawal told the ICPC that he was informed that Suleiman was not a first-time offender, as he had even appeared before the Forgery Panel at the Department of Land Administration.
“Strangely enough, no action has been taken against him. While others were visited with serious disciplinary actions including dismissal from service, Suleiman is still let loose in the system and allowed to commit more havoc,” he said in a statement at the ICPC.
A possible connivance within AGIS
As stated by Lawal in his petition to the ICPC, Suleiman was not doing this for the first time, as all the steps taken could not have been done by an amateur.
From signatures to photographs and a possible cloning of a company’s certificate of incorporation, the whole act suggested that Suleiman did not act alone and might have been assisted from inside AGIS.
It would be impossible for Suleiman to get a copy of Graph Ventures Limited’s certificate of incorporation, which was one of the documents he submitted for the collection of the C of O, from the Corporate Affairs Commission, CAC, as the original would expectedly be with the company.
According to Zemo Victor, a lawyer vast in company matters and how CAC operates, the only way Suleiman could have gotten a copy of the company’s certificate of incorporation, without the company giving it to him, would be from inside AGIS.
“CAC would only release a company’s certificate of incorporation to the person, usually a lawyer, who filed for the incorporation,” Zemo said, adding that the person would need to sign a document at the CAC, including his or her accreditation number, as evidence that he or she collected the original.
He also added that if a company loses its certificate of incorporation, CAC cannot issue another one.
“The only thing CAC would issue close to a certificate of incorporation is a Certified True Copy, which itself is issued on two conditions; if you lose your original certificate, in which case you must bring an affidavit from court, or when you need it for something else, say a contract, that specifically requires a CTC,” he explained.
It is also curious that despite the allegation of forgery levelled against its staff by the real owner of the land and a denial by Graph Ventures Limited that it had any dealings with Suleiman, AGIS took no action.
Rather, it said it was satisfied with the forged documents its staff presented. Also, when Graph Ventures Limited, through its lawyers, Emmanuel Ekong & Co., wrote to AGIS on June 25, 2014 urging it to verify all documents presented, the agency kept mute. It did not even reply the letter.
By this time, Suleiman was no longer at AGIS, as he was transferred to the Abuja Metropolitan Management Council, AMMC, in December 2013.
The www.icirnigeria.org was informed that he was transferred because of similar cases of forgery and fraud against him.
“He is very notorious and brags that he has connections and that he is from a royal family,” a staff, who pleaded anonymity, told our reporter.
“Anytime there was a case against him and he was invited before a panel, he would cry his way out of punishment,” the staff said.
AGIS refused to comment, as the head of information and customer service, Uzodinma Cosmas, said since the matter was under investigation, the agency had decided that it would not comment on it.
Cosmas would neither deny nor confirm if Suleiman had faced a disciplinary panel before, saying the reporter’s persistence amounted to media bullying.
Interestingly, when Suleiman was at AGIS, his duties had nothing to do with issuance or collection of certificates of occupancy.
According to him, in a statement at the ICPC, his schedules were “writing memos, in charge of transport, maintaining the AGIS building and other Adhoc matters.”
Our findings revealed that it would have been easy to detect any discrepancy if AGIS had done its work properly since it also had a file containing the land documents from Lawal. It would simply have gone back to this file and compared the documents inside with the ones presented by Suleiman.
That would have raised suspicion because a lot of inconsistencies would have been uncovered.
One of the first things to notice is that the passport photographs on the International Passport data pages presented by Suleiman were completely different from the ones AGIS had from Graph Ventures Limited, the original allotee of the land, or Buba Mamman Lawal, the new owner.
The dates and places of birth, dates of issuance and expiry, signatures, etc. on the data pages presented by Suleiman were all completely different from the original copies, as seen by the www.icirnigeria.org.
According to the Nigeria Immigration Service, the passport numbers presented by Suleiman and allegedly belonging to Kumzhi and Graham, A11928504 and A09950428 respectively could not be found in the NIS passport store records, meaning that the two passports were non-existent.
When quizzed by ICPC investigators, Suleiman claimed the land documents were given to him by one army General.
According to him, he was approached by the General sometime in 2013 and given the land documents to collect the C of O.
“Based on trust and without verification, I collected the C of O for him and handed it over to him,” he said. This may not be true that Suleiman handed over the document to the said General, as he was in possession of the C of O since May, 2013 when he met Ibrahim of Huuudha Real Estate and Property with the intention to sell. This was just over a month after he collected it from AGIS.
Suleiman said he did not crosscheck the documents to know if they were genuine because there were officers at the C of O collection office whose duty it was to verify the authenticity of documents presented.
He also told investigators that he would not be surprised if the documents he was given were fake, as the General had once told him he used his houseboys’ photographs to open a company because it was unethical for a serving officer to have a registered company.
He did not give the General’s name and said the last time he spoke with him was in May 2014 when the officer called him from China that he would be undergoing a heart surgery to remove a bullet in his thigh.
He added that he did not know where the General lived, as he (General) was coming from Ibadan.
For helping to collect the C of O, Suleiman said the General paid him N5million as appreciation and admitted that he knew it was unethical to collect such money as a civil servant.
Investigations showed that Suleiman was paid millions by Huuudha Real Estate and Property, to which he sold the land.
Bank documents seen by the www.icirnigeria.org showed that between April and July 2013, Huuudha Real Estate and Property paid Suleiman at least N40million from its Zenith Bank account number.
The six-count charge of falsification and conferment of corrupt advantage
Following Lawal’s petition to the ICPC, the anti-graft agency began investigation and Suleiman was charged to court on December 30, 2014.
However, getting him to attend his trial was no easy thing, as on three occasions that he was due in court, Suleiman was nowhere to be found.
He was supposed to be arraigned first on June 1, 2015 but he was not present in court. The case was then adjourned to July 17 and he was again absent.
The ICPC noticed that he deliberately avoided his arraignment. It was either his phone was switched off when he knew court would sit or he would say he was on his way but would only surface after the case had been adjourned. He would then plead with the ICPC and promise to show up on the next trial date.
The ICPC then got him to sign an undertaking on September 30 to report at the Commission daily for 10 days from 8am-2pm. The ICPC believed with this move, he would be compelled to make himself available for his next arraignment on October 6.
Curiously, having reported for the first five days, Suleiman refused to show up on the 6th day, which was his arraignment day and as usual, he showed up at the Commission after the matter had been called and adjourned.
He was subsequently detained at the ICPC and taken to court the following day, which prompted Justice Baba Husseini Yusuf of Court 4 in the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, High Court, Maitama, to remand him in prison till the next date, October 13, 2015.
Before the next court date, it was learnt that the ICPC came under serious pressure from Suleiman’s relatives, friends and associates, including a member of the commission’s board who had links with Kano emirate, not to oppose his bail application.
When the matter came up for hearing, the prosecution opposed the bail application, citing the accused’s penchant for evading his arraignment.
However, the judge granted Suleiman bail but shockingly did not state the bail conditions. When the prosecutor requested for details of the conditions of the bail granted, the judge referred him to the court registrar.
Surprisingly also, the matter was adjourned for three months, which is seen by the prosecution team as a way of giving the accused person ample time to see how he can settle the matter out of court by finding a way of getting one of the claimants on the land to let go of their claim.
Lawal revealed to the icirnigeri.org that Suleiman and his team approached and begged him to accept some money to let go of the land.
“He pleaded that I should give him a soft landing and I asked what he meant by that. He said I should accept some money and forget about the land,” Lawal told our reporter.
“I told them I was not interested in selling the land and that if anybody should be approached, it should be the man (Igwe) from whom he collected money for the land,” the former security officer said.
Our reporter was at the Abuja Metropolitan Management Council, AMMC, to talk to Suleiman but he was not around and his colleagues in the logistics unit said they had not seen him at work for sometime.
Our reporter then called him on phone and he said he was on leave and had travelled to Kano. He initially said he would not speak about the matter but latter appeared to change his mind.
“I am not comfortable talking on phone. I need to see you face-to-face,” he said and asked the reporter to wait till he resumed work.
The reporter sent him a text that he had a deadline to submit the report and wanted his side of events. Suleiman later called and offered to give the reporter “something” to wait for him.
“I will send somebody to your office tomorrow to bring something for you or you can send me your account number so that I will send you something and you wait for me to come back so that we’ll talk,” he said.
A source at the ICPC told our reporter early this week that a solid case has also been built against Iguma and that he would soon be charged to court.