Admin I Friday, July 07, 2023
IKEJA, Lagos, Nigeria – The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, has commenced trial of CEO Trust Group, Taiwo Oluwadahunsola, and Adebola Adetayo and Green Eagles before Justice Olubunmi Abike-Fadipe of the Special Offences Court sitting in Ikeja, Lagos.
Trial of Trust Group and Green Eagles for alleged N996,000,311.00 fraud commenced with the EFCC presenting its first witness, the President of Volition Capital Investment Staff (Eti-Osa) Cooperative Multipurpose Society Limited, Kola Oyeneyin, who testified against the defendants.
The Commission, EFCC, had on Thursday, March 23, 2023, arraigned the duo alongside a company, Green Eagles Limited, on a 19-count charge bordering on conspiracy to steal, stealing, money laundering and issuance of dishonored cheques to the tune of N996,000,311.00).
They pleaded “not guilty” to the charges. At the proceeding on Thursday, the witness while being led in evidence by the counsel for the EFCC, Rotimi Oyedepo, SAN, narrated how the defendants colluded to defraud the Cooperative.
He said that between March and August 2020 when we were just coming out from COVID, every quarter we try to see companies that we want to put funds together to invest in the business.
“In the case of Green Eagles Limited, shortlisted by our team to consider investing in, we did the typical due diligence that we do on companies that we sign off and invest in.
“We had meetings with the first and second defendants and visited sites that they supposedly owned, to prove that they run an agricultural entity in Nigeria.
“After this was done, as we normally do, we created a specific investment plan between our Cooperative and Green Eagles Limited. It was called Farm Estate Management, and the purpose was that in the first two years of our investments our capital which we will typically collate as a collective investment, from members, including retirees, who trust us with their money due to our integrity over the years, we presented to them this company that we will be investing in.
The total of the investment, he said, was N950 million, which according to him, was paid in tranches following the agreement with the defendants in August 2020. He explained that due to the huge investment, the Cooperative had insisted that it was not going to be paying money directly to the company.
“We appointed a trustee, FBN Quest Trustees, brought into the agreement, addressed our part of the agreement was to ensure that the funds were disbursed on time so that they can meet up with the (purported) planting as they presented it to us so that they will be able to meet up with the returns the following year,” he said. He noted that as difficult as it was to put the funds together, “we did because we didn’t want to default on our side of the obligation”.
According to him, following the investment, “Between December 2020 and January 2021, we started to see online news circulating that Green Eagles Limited’s directors who are the first and second defendants, were accused of defrauding countless retail investors, who had put in small money into their agro-wealth plan, and this caught the team’s attention.”
He told the court that he immediately called Taiwo, the CEO, who simply “brushed it off that there was nothing like that, that only one person had an issue and that they were trying to sort it out in Port Harcourt”.
According to him, the development was just two months after the final disbursement, and “so we became uneasy immediately, and from that point, we started our investigation”.
“We spent January, and February rechecking everything about this company, and by the end of February, towards March that we expected the first tranche of our investment paid in September, was to be due for us and then we pay out to members.
“I made a surprise visit to their office in Maryland (Ikeja) where I met Adebola, to enquire about the first returns as agreed. It was at this point that it dawned on us, that everything that we had been hearing about the company until that time, was about to be true because Adebola immediately said she was having high blood pressure and not feeling well, and that they wanted to defer for another three months to end of June.”
He testified further that it was realized later that whenever the money was paid by FBN Quest Trustees to vendors running into millions of naira for orders, the defendants would “go behind to collect the money back from the vendors and cancel the orders”.
“So N950 million was diverted to something else that we don’t, know” he said.
He added that it was later discovered that all the farms that they laid claim to, in Kebbi, Adamawa, which the Cooperative team had also inspected, “didn’t belong to them”.
He said: “They had organized with locals in those places to showcase the farms as being their own, using the means to convince our team that they were a legitimate enterprise.
According to him, Green Eagles Limited defaulted in paying returns and issued cheques for payments that were never honored.
He said: “Between that period and now, not one Naira has come back to our Cooperative out of the total sum that was given to them. There was nothing we didn’t do to try and check if there was any element of genuineness in this entity called Green Eagles or Taiwo or Adebola.
“This was premeditated, and they set out to receive money from innocent individuals, retail and corporate like us, with no intension at all, to do business.”
He further told the court that following the development, the Cooperative wrote a petition to the EFCC. Thereafter, the prosecution applied to tender the said petition along with its attached documents having been identified by the witness.
There was no objection from the defense counsel, O. Ajanaku. Thereafter, the petition and the attached documents were admitted in evidence as Exhibit P1, P1a, and P1b. The prosecution also tendered in evidence several documents including the agreement between all parties, several Profoma invoices exchanged in the course of the transactions, and minutes of a meeting had with Green Eagles Limited on June 28, 2021.
There was no objection from the defence and they were all admitted in evidence against the defendants. The case has been adjourned till December 13 and 14, 2023 for the continuation of trial.
