The Representative now angling to take over from Farouk Lawan as the new Mr. Intergrity in the house, Hon (?) Femi Gbajabiamila, has been exposed as a fraud who admitted to theft of his clients funds while serving as an attorney in the U.S. State of Georgia.
Femi Gbaja as he then was known later resurrected as Femi Gbajabiamila perhaps to hide his fraudulent past and is now positioning himself as an integrity activist in the House of Representatives.
The punishment for Femi Gbaja’s offence would have been outright debarment, however he played dead before a full panel of the Supreme Court of Georgia led by Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears,before the court could rule on the petition from his client, he filed a petition for Voluntary Discipline,filed under bar rule 4-227(b) in which he fully admitted to stealing $25,000 from his client.
The name Femi Gbaja being the name he was being referred to in the case file, accepted payment of $25,000 as a personal injury claims and deposited those funds in his attorney trust account in January 2003. He failed to disburse the funds to his client; instead he withdrew the funds, closed his practice and left for Nigeria where he ran for elections to represent Surulere I Federal Constituency in the Federal House of Representative under the banner of Alliance for Democracy (AD) in 2003. Upon arrival in Nigeria, curiously, Mr. Femi Gbaja added another name to avoid detection, he is known in Nigeria with a compound name “Femi Gbaja-Biamila”.
A cursory look at his bio on the website of the National Assembly (www.nassnig.org) also betrays his crooked intention to avoid detection, while he gave his undergraduate degree college as the University of Lagos; his US education was shrouded in mystery as he claimed to have attended John Marshall Law School, USA. True, Mr. Femi Gbaja is a graduate of John Marshall Law School in Atlanta, Georgia and was admitted to the Georgia State Bar in June 2001 but in the United States alone there are two of such law schools, one in Chicago and another one in Atlanta, Georgia where Femi Gbaja graduated.
In the Georgia Attorney Directory, Femi Gbaja gave his address as 20, Mercy Eneli Street Surulere, Lagos. He is said to have refunded the clients money ($25,000) in 2006 and his lawyers have already submitted a certification of compliance of the Supreme Court ruling as of March 2007. Making him ineligible to practice law in the State of Georgia until February.
Source: Naijapundit
The United States Department of Justice has secured a restraining order against more than $3 million looted funds and a mansion in Houston, Texas owned by former Delta State Governor, Chief James Ibori, in the U.S.
Ibori is currently serving a 13-year jail term in the United Kingdom for corruption and money laundering.
The department got the powers through an application filed under seal on May 16, 2012, in U.S District Court in the District of Columbia, to register and enforce two orders from United Kingdom courts against more than $3 million in corruption proceeds related to Ibori.
This was announced by Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton in a statement on the U.SDOJ website on Tuesday.
“The application, which was filed under seal on May 16, 2012, in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, seeks to restrain assets belonging to Governor Ibori and Bhadresh Gohil, Ibori’s former English solicitor, that are proceeds of corruption.
“Specifically, it seeks to restrain a mansion in Houston and two Merrill Lynch brokerage accounts. U.S. District Judge Lamberth granted the application and issued a restraining order under seal on May 21, 2012.
“The department was notified today that its application to unseal the restraining order was granted.
“The United States is working with the United Kingdom’s Crown Prosecution Service and the Metropolitan Police Service to forfeit these corruption proceeds,” it said.
According to the application, Ibori served as the governor of Nigeria’s oil-rich Delta State from 1999 to 2007, and misappropriated millions of dollars in Delta State funds.
He laundered those proceeds through a myriad of shell companies, intermediaries and nominees in several jurisdictions, including the UK, with the help of Gohil. Although Nigeria’s Constitution prohibits state governors from maintaining foreign bank accounts and serving as directors of private companies, Ibori and his associates accumulated millions of dollars in assets in the UK and U.S, according to the application.
By nigeriana
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