N47.1B ALLEGED THEFT: EFCC CLOSES CASE AGAINST AKINGBOLA

The Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC) yesterday formally closed its case against former chief executive officer of the now defunct Intercontinental Bank Plc (now Access Bank), Chief Erastus Akingbola on a N47.1 billion theft charge it brought against him before a Lagos High Court, sitting in Ikeja.

For the past 10 months, Akingbola along with his associate and general manager of Tropics Securities Limited, Bayo Dada, have been on trial before Justice Habeeb Abiru in a 29 count charge of theft, which was later reduced to 21-count after the charges related to his wife, Anthonia, were dropped.

During the trial, the prosecution called only two witnesses. They include the Chief Inspector of Access Bank, Abdulraheem Jimoh and an EFCC operative who was part of the team that investigated the bank, Nkechi Ibekaku. The first witness, Jimoh, in his evidence-in-chief told the court that an alleged transfer of the bank's money by Akingbola, was done with no document in the bank's record to justify it, adding that no payments would have been made to any company under such circumstance.

'There was no debt justifying the payments,' he said.

In her evidence-in-chief, Ibekaku told the court that the second defendant (Dada), did not produce any document to back all the transfers of money allegedly made by Akingbola to the account owned by Tropics Securities Limited and some other companies owned by Akingbola and his wife.

However, while being cross examined by Akingbola's counsel, Deji Sasegbon (SAN), Ibekaku told the court that as at the time the transactions were made, there was no money in the account of the former boss of the bank, but said EFCC investigations revealed that three Skye Bank cheques worth N2.5 billion allegedly issued by Chartwell Securities Limited were illegal transactions.

According to her, the EFCC team found out the account belonging to Chartwell was credited from Intercontinental Bank's account with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and that the beneficiary was Akingbola.?'I believed and still believe that it was Intercontinental Bank money with CBN that went into Tropic Finance account. The cheques issued by Chartwell were already issued in favour of Tropics and anybody could be sent to deposit it, but we noticed that the cheques were deposited by a staff of the Intercontinental bank,' she said.

Explaining further, she told the court that there was no simultaneous exchange of cheques worth N2.5billion that was paid into the Access Bank account of Chartwell Securities adding that over $11 million was also illegally transferred from the bank's dollar account.

Ibekaku had stated that no document was provided during investigations to show that there was a transaction which entitles Akingbola to N10 million as commission. The matter has been adjourned till May 21,22,28 and 30 for defence to open its case.