By Azu Ishiekwene
In the incredibly sad courtroom drama of Tali Shani v Chief Mike Agbedor Abu Ozekhome (2025) UKFTT 1090 (PC), two ordinary Nigerians from unlikely quarters, each doing what would appear to be their daily work, made the difference.
The first was Ibrahim Sani, a superintendent of police at the Force Intelligence Department of the Nigeria Police Force in Abuja, a notoriously corrupt department under retired DIG Mike Ogbizi.
Sani had received a request and complaint from Chief Ozekhome (the Respondent in this case) to investigate alleged forged documents, including a “9 mobile” number, stated to be that of Tali Shani (the Applicant), registered at a Jos, Plateau State address.
Ozekhome (SAN) needed the police report in the case in Judge Ewan Paton’s court regarding the ownership of a house he claimed had been given to him by the late General Jeremiah Useni, but which the land registry in London had referred to a tribunal after one Ms Tali Shani, claiming to be Useni’s “wife,” emerged.
Following a search, Superintendent Sani found that not only did the phone number not belong to Ms Tali Shani, but the registered Jos address was also fake. Sani’s evidence during the trial left a strong impression on Judge Paton.
The judge said similar nice things about Festus Esangbedo, the head of legal of the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), who worked with Sani to expose the fake NIN that the fake Ms Tali Shani and her accomplices, including her phoney son, Ayodele Damola, wanted to use to claim the London house that they claimed Useni bequeathed them.
Indictment redefined?
Tali Shani (male) and Ms Tali Shani (female), like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, are fictional characters in sordid tale of how a London tribunal found that 79 Randall Avenue, London, owned by the late General Useni, which he bought for £110,000 at the time, was marred by evidence of extensive identity fraud, forged documents, and non-existent persons, in a cast of very senior lawyers in Nigeria and their accomplices abroad on both sides of the case.
I desperately hoped that Ozekhome, a senior advocate of Nigeria and equivalent of a King’s Counsel, whom I hold in high esteem, would say it was not true; that what Judge Paton said about him recruiting his son, a young lawyer, to invent and contrive evidence to produce a charlatan to take over the property of General Useni who he said was his friend and client, was mistaken.
However, in an extraordinary interpretation of the judgment that left many speechless, Ozekhome told LEADERSHIP that the judgment was “not an indictment.” Mohammed Edewor, another senior lawyer prominently named on the Applicant’s side of this bizarre case, has been missing in action.
A phantom’s revenge
In the two and a half years that the matter was in court, the only thing that seemed real, and which the evidence before the judge could support, was that General Useni might have bought the house sometime in 1993, under a code name. Everything else was an elaborate web of fakery, from the witnesses, their identities, a Keffi court order, email addresses, and medical certificates – including ones issued under the letterhead of an actual Lagos-based hospital.
The death certificate was fabricated by the fake son and fake uncle of General Useni’s fake wife, who also went on to fabricate the obituary of the fake wife, who purportedly died in a road accident between Jos and Abuja.
Whether Tali Shani, the Applicant, was a product of the Respondent or a reactionary phantom in his own right, also out to grab, one thing was clear: Tali Shani (male) was no less an audacious character in the sordid tale.
He couldn’t tell the court how much he paid for the house he claimed he owned or produce any conveyancing documents; yet, in a striking moment of epiphany, he remembered that he bought the house for £200,000 (the price was £110,000) through his “cattle business,” after a prosperous spell of “selling sweats and mangos.” By his own record, he was only 20 at the time.
One more for the Crown
He didn’t forget to add that, out of the goodness of his heart, he asked General Useni (who was not his mate by any stretch) to be the agent for him! Would General Useni, who testified in this case on his sickbed, not be saddened in his grave to know that the house he bought, under apparently shadowy circumstances, may potentially pass to the Crown (under the principle of ownerless goods) after this bizarre dispute?
Or that a twat is calling him his errand boy, when circumstantial evidence suggests that he, Useni, probably “invented” Tali Shani as a conduit at the height of the searchlight on his offshore account for money laundering.
I do not expect this story to interest the man on the street, who thinks that the average Nigerian big man is a thief, no matter what, and that, in any case, the fuss over 79 Randall Avenue is material only because this sad dispute has brought it to light. Who knows how many more have passed quietly?
Silence as outrage
But can and should professional groups also look the other way? For example, should the Nigerian Bar Association pretend that it’s OK for lawyers to contrive and invent evidence actively without a rebuke?
At the onset of this case, at least one lawyer of British origin, Tom Walsh, was involved. Before the matter ended, he had exited, leaving only counsel of Nigerian origin, including Abimbola Badejo and Kingsley Efemuai, stewing in the mess.
In Framed, John Grisham and Jim McCloskey demonstrate that manipulating the court system is not racial. But “Tali Shani v Mike Ozekhome” is a variety of the Nigerian jurisprudential engineering that activist lawyer, Chidi Odinkalu, has railed against ceaselessly.
Now, jurisprudential engineering appears to be an export commodity, calling into question every document a Nigerian files, even for routine processes such as visa applications. Is it business as usual one year after Her Lordship, Chief Justice Kudirat Kekere-Ekun, promised “to elevate the judiciary to new heights, improve its reputation, and sustain public confidence in the judicial system”?
Will the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) ignore evidence of a fabrication of a death certificate bearing the name of a “doctor” issued in an actual hospital in Jibowu, Lagos, with a fake obituary? Or is travesty normalised?
A mini P&ID
Fifteen years ago, a dispute centred on a Gas Supply and Processing Agreement (GSPA) under which Nigeria was to supply “wet” natural gas to Process and Industrial Developments Limited (P&ID). The company was to deliver “lean” gas, keep the natural gas liquids for sale, and build a plant in Nigeria.
One thing led to another, and five years later, after P&ID bribed Nigerian officials, committed perjury and improperly obtained documents from Nigeria, the company still got $11 billion in arbitral awards. It took nine years of a feisty legal challenge by the Nigerian government in a UK high court to topple the house built on fraud by two Irish citizens on the foundation of a trail of paper fraud by their Nigerian cohorts.
79 Randall Avenue has similar features of big men, treachery, forgeries and fraud. The amount involved is less on the scale, and the government is not involved. But the shame is of comparable magnitude.
Ishiekwene is the Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the book Writing for Media and Monetising it.
