For seven years, Sunny Obazee, a director at former BANKPHB, now Keystone Bank went through mental torture during his prosecution alongside three other individuals at Lagos High Court, Igbosere for fraud case involving N855 million that he was later discharged and freed.
Some people in that circumstance may have been killed in jungle justice or sentenced to various years of imprisonment that were not able to prove their case beyond reasonable doubt. But Sunny Obazee was able to convince Justice Kudirat Jose of the Lagos High Court, Igbosere that he knows nothing about the fraud case. He was freed but he is not totally freed from the emotional trauma he was subjected to for seven years.
How did it start?
In early August, 2012, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, arraigned three officials of Keystone Bank (formerly Bank PHB): Anayo Nwosu, Olajide Oshodi and Sunny Obazee alongside the managing director of Nulec Industries Limited, Ashok Isran over N855 million fraud.
The suspects were arraigned on charges bordering on conspiracy to obtain the said sum from one Sir Daniel Chukwudozie of Dozzy Oil & Gas Limited under the false pretence of paying for preference shares of Nulec Industries Limited in an upcoming Initial Public Offer. Nulec Industries Limited and Keystone Bank were also separately charged with the suspects.
Ashok Israni, an Indian and the owner of Nulec Industries Limited, was said to have taken some loan from the then-bankphb. It was calculated that Israni indebtedness to the bank rose to N130 million.
Around June 2007, before Obazee joined the bank, Israni decided to raise capital for his company through Private Placement and BANKPHB constituted a team to make a presentation to the company management to be the Issuing House for the exercise. Subsequently, Obazee who had worked in UBA Capital, Oceanic Bank among others before he joined the BANKPHB in December 2007 and by virtue of his new position as Divisional Director, Investment Banking, he was the leader of that team.
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Finally, Nulec approved that BANKPHB be the issuing house to the offer. Obazee told a newspaper that the offer for the Private Placement was not underwritten by the bank. “If that was the case, I would have been required to sign and the bank would have needed an Approval Memo, as that would mean we were exposing the bank to some risks. The document they produced said the transaction should be underwritten by the bank, but that was not done. I wasn’t a signatory to the account and nobody in my division was.
“The allotment of the shares was done by the bank and I wasn’t involved also. We asked that a Reporting Accountant and a Solicitor be appointed for the transaction. The job of the Reporting Accountant was to verify the viability of NULEC Industries Limited and NULEC would do two or three years’ projection about its activities and what it wanted to use the funds for”.
According to the report, he said that during the course of the trial, the Reporting Accountant gave evidence that NULEC was viable as of the time the money was given to it. When we handled the offer, the company was not dead”
In his account, Obazee further told the newspaper that he personally also committed N5.7 million to Private Placement. A company, Dozzy Oil and Gas Limited, owned by one Chief Chukwudozie, committed the sum of N855 million to buy 600 million units of the shares at N5 per share.
“And other things being equal and in accordance with the regulations, if the shares were listed as planned, the company and its owners would have made N3 billion from the sale of the shares and about N2 billion as profit. Unfortunately, the Capital Market collapsed in 2009.
“By the time the market collapsed, it affected a lot of things, even banks and BANKPHB was not left out”. In the media report, he said at this point Chukwudozie started making demand for his money. This he said led to some of his colleagues in the bank being interrogated and probed by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC.
“I came back from leave in 2011 and I was asked by the management to go to the EFCC office to explain myself. It was at the EFCC office that I met Chukwudozie for the first time. I explained to him that the ugly development was as a result of the market collapse and I also invested some funds into the project and that if I didn’t believe it would work, I would not have done so. The next thing was that I was made to write a statement and asked a series of questions. I was now joined with those who had been under investigation for two years over the matter”.
One of the counts read: “That you, Anayo Nwosu, Ashok Israni, Olajide Oshodi, Sunny Obazee, Bank PHB Plc/keystone Bank Ltd and NULEC Industries Limited, between 14 July and 31 July 2008, in Lagos within the jurisdiction of this Honourable Court, did fraudulently convert to your use the sum of N285, 000, 000 being the property of Dozzy Oil and Gas Ltd, when you credited the account of NULEC with the said sum to defray its debt owed to Bank PHB Plc as against paying the sum into the Private Placement Account of NULEC, which sum was to be used as payment for the purchase of shares of NULEC Industries Limited under a Private Placement.”
Another count read: “That you, Anayo Nwosu, Ashok Israni, Olajide Oshodi, Sunny Obazee, Bank PHB Plc/ Keystone Bank Ltd and NULEC Industries Limited, sometime in 2008 within the jurisdiction of this Honourable Court, with intent to defraud, obtained the sum of N855, 000, 000 from Dozzy Oil and Gas Ltd, on the false pretence that NULEC Industries Limited was in active profit- making manufacturing and trading activities, thereby purporting same to be payment for the purchase of shares of the said NULEC Industries Limited under a Private Placement.”
During the trial, the defendants were granted bail on the following terms: The 1st, 3rd and 4th defendants were asked to produce a letter of undertaking signed by Keystone Bank’s Chairman and Managing Director. And, whenever any of the defendants fail to appear for trial, the bank will pay a fine of one hundred million naira for each of the defendants on each day they fail to appear.
For the 2nd defendant, he was granted bail in the sum of fifty million naira (N50million) and two sureties in like sum. The sureties must be resident in Lagos, and have landed properties in Lagos state. The documents of the landed properties, to be verified with the Lagos state Land Registry, should be deposited with the court Registrar. The sureties, who must be gainfully employed, are to show evidence of tax payment in the last two years.
The judgement
After seven years of trial, the judge in her judgment, discharged and acquitted the fourth defendant, Sunny Obazee. The judge, however, convicted and sentenced the first, second and third defendants to five years imprisonment each on counts of stealing. The companies were also ordered to pay a fine of N20 million to the Federal Government . The judge also ordered the convicts to pay, as restitution, N395 million to the victim of the fraud.
Responding to the judgement, Obazee told the newspaper , “I knew I wasn’t involved in any criminal activity” but regretted that the mental torture was great. “At a point, I had to file a case of breach of human rights against the EFCC because they were harassing and intimidating me with calls and intermittent detention after we had been admitted to bail.
“I have a boy and a girl and both were studying in Canada; all of us, including my wife, were broken down emotionally.
“In fact, one day in 2015, I put a call to my son and told him we would be going to court the following day and he told me that he was not feeling okay because he kept thinking about my ordeal. He said he could not move one of his legs and one arm. He was crying on the phone. He said he didn’t want to tell me about his situation so as not to compound my problem.
“I had to call my younger brother, who is a medical doctor in the United States to go and help check on him. The second day in court, I sat down weeping profusely and a lady lawyer in the EFCC team had to go and explain my situation to Rotimi Jacobs, the lead lawyer for the agency, who brought the matter to the attention of the court. The court magnanimously granted that I be allowed to go and see my boy. Only God helped me not to lose a boy who was close to finishing his university education over a case I knew nothing about. I would have lost Edosa over nothing”.
Obazee further told the newspaper that he could never quantify what he had lost emotionally and financially over a case he was finally discharged and acquitted. He said in the report that his concern now is to get over the burden the trial placed on him.
