IBORI: Judges scold Met Police for hiding evidence of fraud

The failure of London Metropolitan (MET) Police and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to reveal evidence of police corruption in the fraud case that led to the conviction of a former Delta State governor, Chief James Ibori, has been decried.

The judges sitting on the appeal filed by Ibori challenging his conviction by a London court expressed worries over the disclosure failures and said that it is possible the development could have caused great injustice in Ibori’s trial.

Ibori was charged to court for laundering almost £50 million and was sentenced to a 13-year jail term in 2012 after he pleaded guilty to the fraud charges.

Ibori, who only regained freedom in 2016 upon the completion of his four-year jail term, had however approached the appellant court challenging his conviction. He is arguing that if he had been told about the corruption intelligence that he would not have pleaded guilty.

When the matter came up last Thursday, the judges, Lord Justice Gross, Mr. Justice William Davis and Mr. Justice Garnham, hinted that the failure of MET and CPS to hand over intelligence might have possibly caused great injustice against the former governor.

In a statement on Friday, Ibori’s media aide, Tony Eluemunor, quoted the judges to have said, “We do not minimise the prosecution’s disclosure failures in this case. To the contrary, we take a grave view of them, as recent events have yet again emphasised that disclosure failures can cause great injustice.”

Report show that MET had intelligence since 2007 that one of its investigating officers was being paid for information about the case but was denied by the authorities.

As stated by the judges, the authorities failed on about four occasions in 2013 and 2014, when it had opportunity, to disclose the evidence but failed to do so until 2016, a development the authorities attributed to a serious “communications breakdown” within the prosecution team.

Ibori’s lead counsel, Ms. Sasha Wass, QC, had therefore in November 2016, written to Alison Saunders, the director of public prosecutions (DPP), alleging that the failure to carry out a proper disclosure review “allows the police role in bribery and its concealment in five separate trials over eight years to go unreported.”

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She had further claimed in correspondence to the DPP that she and the CPS were “seriously misled” for years by MET detectives over the source of the corruption intelligence, saying that its relevance was hidden from counsel.

The judges had urged the prosecution to respond before they give their judgment on Ibori’s appeal.

Recall that an earlier appeal by Ibori’s solicitor, Bhadresh Gohil, who was convicted for being an accomplice in the money-laundering plot, was rejected last February on the grounds that he had knowledge of the alleged police corruption at the time of the trial but did not use it.

 

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