by Magnus Onyibe

In my view, Ibori pleaded guilty due to the psychological and physical trauma he has been put through by law enforcement agencies in the past eight years in Nigeria, Dubai and now the UK.

The weird thing about the ongoing Chief James Onanefe lbori, former governor of Delta State assets confiscation trial saga in the UK is that the British court presided over by Justice Anthony Pitts has on Monday, 7 October, 2013, came to the conclusion that there is no evidence to support Ibori’s conviction in the UK, a decision which a Nigerian Court presided over by Justice Marcel Awokulehin had arrived at on Thursday, 17 December, 2009, nearly four years ago. However, the difference between the UK court and her Nigerian counterpart is that while the case was quashed in Nigeria for lack of evidence, Judge Pitts has admitted that the case lacked evidence as argued by lbori’s defence counsel in the UK, but decided to adjourn for retrial to enable prosecution gather evidence against lbori. A decision that has sent legal tongues wagging across the world because (1) about 50 trips had been made to Nigeria in search of evidence against Ibori by Metropolitan police officer Peter Clark in a period of eight years (2) Peter Clark, under cross-examination by defence counsel, has also admitted under oath that the evidence he used to convict Ibori was fabricated (3) both prosecution and defence had made their concluding submissions in a three-week long trial which procedurally should have been brought to a close.

So what in the world justifies Judge Pitts’ decision to adjourn for retrial?
Recall that Judge Pitts himself had pointed out the previous day that the Crown Prosecution Counsel, Sasha Wass’s argument that the case be adjourned instead of concluded as required by legal procedures was tantamount to asking a referee in a football match to move the goal post when the match is about to end. That the respected judge turned around dramatically to grant Wass’s weird request while overruling Ibori defence counsel, Queens Counsel, QC Ivan Krolic’s plea for a conclusive judgement is curious and at the same time ominous. Curious because the decision goes against the grain of legal procedures and ominous because it reinforces the belief in some quarters that Ibori had been targeted for jail by hook or crook by the British authorities for reasons yet unknown.

Fortuitously, Ibori’s case in the UK is poised to be a game changer if not a landmark or watershed  in the annals of British legal system because if Judge Pitts’ decision to send the case back for fresh retrial is sustained, it would probably be appealed against perhaps up to the supreme court level and if he grants Ibori’s counsel’s request that the charges should be quashed and dismissed as the Nigerian judge did, the Crown may be faced with a deluge of civil suits for wrongful conviction of Ibori, his only sister Christine, his wife Nkoyo and Udoamaka, the mother of his child. The challenge of how the system would remedy the jail terms they have served is obviously a dilemma which sounds more like the proverbial standing between the devil and deep blue sea.
As things now stand, Nigerian judiciary with particular reference to lbori’s case, in my view, has been more upright than the much vaunted UK judiciary because both courts came to the same conclusion of not enough evidence to nail Ibori but only the Nigerian court passed judgement without external interference by quashing the case but the UK court appear to be equivocating through a dramatic decision to adjourn for a retrial even after admitting that the request was absurd. Is that not something to celebrate by the learned judge, Justice Marcel Awokulehin and by extension the Nigerian judiciary that was lampooned and pooh poohed by the vociferous social critics and human rights activists who alleged that the feat that could not be accomplished in Nigeria was achieved in the UK?

In pursuing their nefarious ambition to nail Ibori by all means, the pair of Sasha Wass and Peter Clark along with their co-travellers in Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC) at that time, did not consider the social upheavals that jailing Ibori, wife, sister, and mother of his child would cause their victims whose kids were between ages 3-15.We do not need social scientists to enlighten us on the consequential damage arising from lack of parental care for adolescent and teenage children whose parents were locked away by inefficient and ineffective judicial officials but suffice it to say that those long-suffering children may never recover from and would continue to bear the scar from the trauma of being forcibly separated from their parents at the period they needed them the most due to unjustifiable incarceration.
It is obnoxious and unfathomable that an advanced democracy like the UK is involved in such horrendous subversion of justice. So the pair of Wass and Clark have attracted public opprobrium of international dimension to the UK and ideally, they should be investigated for their roles in bringing the Crown to disrepute since judge Pitts has heard and agreed that evidence against lbori was fabricated and as such concluded that the evidence available to him is not enough for him to rule against Ibori on a case that has been ongoing for eight years.

Now, some have argued that if Ibori was not culpable, why did he plead guilty in the UK court? In my view, Ibori pleaded guilty due to the psychological and physical trauma he has been put through by law enforcement agencies in the past eight years in Nigeria, Dubai and now the UK. Tell me which man will not succumb to the pressure of his only sister, Christine, his wife of many years, Nkoyo and the mother of his child, Udoamaka, being jailed on account of a crime allegedly committed by him? How could he still think he had a fighting chance when his young kids in kindergarten and elementary schools were left without parental care and exposed to the vagaries of life in a foreign land? If he was counting on the judiciary to offer him succour, that hope might have evaporated when his lawyer that turned out to be a tool used against him, Bhadresh Gohil, was also jailed for 10 years probably for not co-operating well enough with Investigators. Under such circumstance, hardly any man would still be fighting to free himself when all his loved ones have been cast into the dungeon, as it were, for his sake.

Let me be clear. I don’t condone corruption or fraud so I subscribe to justice being served and if Ibori is fairly tried and found guilty, let him do the time but by the same token, I do not support fighting perceived injustice with injustice as the British judicial system appears to be doing in Ibori’s case. I’m particularly appalled and even outraged by the fact it has been established through a legal process of their choosing that Ibori is guiltless of the allegation of money laundering based on the evidence put forward so  why are they trying to subject him to a retrial through a new legal process if not that the British are hell bent on jailing him and confiscating his assets, which by the way, the British government gets to keep 40% with only 60% returning to Nigeria?

If the latest antics of the Crown Prosecution Counsel that they should be allowed to use a new legal statute, Assumption 72AA 1995, that shifts the burden of proof from the prosecution to the accused is allowed by Judge Pitts, it is believed that the mission to nail Ibori will be a fait accompli as the Crown Prosecution won’t have to manufacture/fabricate evidence as they initially did since the burden will be shifted to Ibori to prove ownership of his assets. That would be unprecedented and a mockery of justice system and it would be embarrassing and a negation of the legal dictum ‘He who alleges must prove’.
Undoubtedly, switching from Criminal Justice Act 1998, which places the burden of proof on the Crown Counsel to Assumption 72AA 1995 which pushes it to the accused, just to nail Ibori, will be nothing short of ambush, persecution as opposed to prosecution and we must all work together to put a stop to this blatant perversion of justice in the UK. When we do, we may be unwittingly protecting ourselves, uncles, aunties, brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers from being victims of persecution in the future.

Ordinarily, human rights societies around the world, worth the title, would rise up in defence of lbori whose rights to a fair trial is being trampled upon in the UK, but then again, most of them are funded by UN organs or western countries whose enlightened self interests are involved. Unsurprisingly, all the top lawyers and civil society organisations in Nigeria that shouted on top of their voices in the bid to impress their paymasters abroad with the volume of pages of newspapers and television airtime that quoted them bashing Nigerian judiciary for failing to nail Ibori and hailing the British court for excellent job, have now gone silent in the light of the new discovery that the  learned Nigerian judge, Awokulehin, did no wrong in quashing the case against lbori for lack of evidence as Justice Pitts just concurred nearly four years after. It may also be fitting to recall at this juncture that British investigators were allegedly funding round trip tickets for television crew and newspaper journalists from Nigeria to cover the Ibori trial in the UK leading to his conviction in the court of  public opinion via the media that regaled Nigerians with stories of how  Ibori allegedly frittered away £50 million belonging to the Delta State Government.

With all those lies being admitted by Metropolitan Police Peter Clark as mere fabrications, the media houses that were gloating over them are now silent like the graveyard. This calls to question the integrity of the media in Nigeria, which should in the spirit of balanced reporting give the Ibori recent victories in UK court similar, if not equal airtime and newspaper space as a testament to their frequent boast that they bring all sides of the story to Nigerians.
Furthermore, it is an open secret that some sections of Nigerian society believe the federal government is culpable in the Ibori odyssey as it has been alleged that government outsourced Ibori’s case to the UK. So it is about time government exonerated itself by also seeking political solution. After all, government recently freed Russians involved in arms struggling into Nigeria as it had previously pardoned American and English men and women who contravened our laws through diplomatic channels, which l believe are yet to be explored in Ibori’s case.

 

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Read this article in the Thisday Newspapers

 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.