- He said he had filed a full appeal in the British Court of Appeal against his 2012 conviction
Former
Governor of Delta state, Chief James Onanefe Ibori, has filed a full
appeal in the British Court of Appeal against his 2012 conviction.
Former Delta state governor, Chief James Ibori
Vanguard
reports that a statement from Ibori’s Media Assistant, Tony Eluemunor,
said Mr Ibori’s counsel informed the Southwark London court on Friday
March 17, 2017, that they have filed the appeal on Ibori’s behalf.
As
a result, the court then indefinitely adjourned the on-going
proceedings concerning the second confiscation hearing. The original
three-week confiscation hearing before Judge Pitts in September 2013 was
unable to make any finding of theft from the Delta State.
The
British Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has, since February 2016 been
undertaking a mammoth disclosure exercise and so far substantial
material evidencing the police corruption and misconduct has been
disclosed.
Recall that Ibori was
released from prison on December 21, 2016 upon a UK court order. He was
sentenced by a United Kingdom court to prison for 13 years and served
out his term before his eventual release.
The
CPS has gagged the media from reporting on this. Chief James Onanefe
Ibori David Rose of the London Mail and Sunday newspaper as well as
other Reporters have made applications in open court for the release of
this material.
Mr Rose, for instance, argued it
is in the public interest to do so, as the Ibori and linked cases are
said to have been corrupted by Metropolitan Police corruption,
prosecution misconduct and significant non-disclosure of key material
which undermines the convictions.
For instance, a BBC report of July 2, 2016, titled “Ibori
lawyer awarded £20,000 by Crown Prosecution Service” mentioned police
and prosecution’s misbehavior as well as their massive misleading of the
courts.
According to the report,
“The extraordinary payment is just the latest twist in a legal case
that has led to investigations into allegations of police corruption and
a cover-up of key evidence”. The BBC report continued: “In May (2016), the CPS acknowledged that it had intelligence that “supports the assertion” that a Metropolitan Police officer was paid for information.
On
Tuesday 7 June 2016, Stephen Kamlish, QC, representing BhadreshGohil
submitted further corroboration of the serious misconduct by the
prosecutors in the case – Sasha Wass QC and Esther Shutzer-Weissman- and
how both knowingly conspired to pervert the course of justice by
orchestrating a cover-up of the corruption and their own past
misconducts.
However, the most
shocking episode concerns the willful misleading of the Court of Appeal
in the Gohil appeal of 2014. When main stream British media , The Times,
Guardian, Sun, Telegraph, etc, focused public interest on the
misconducts, the National Crime Agency (NCA)conducted an inquiry opened
an inquiry.
Mid-September 2016, the NCA’s
report appeared; it confirmed that police officers, working within the
elite Department for International Development-funded Police Unit, were
corrupt, and had withheld substantial material from the defence teams,
but bizarrely stated that the convictions of James Ibori and others
including BhadreshGohil “are safe” – though obtained through acts that clearly fall below the high standards of the British legal system
This
conclusion will now be challenged by the appeal process, not only by
Chief Ibori but also by all other defendants. Most of all, in a
London-based Ben TV interview, Mr Lambertus de Boer, one of the bankers
jailed in the case has dropped this bombshell:
“DfID
entered into an agreement with the Nigerian Authorities in 2005
claiming the first £25m from all funds recovered during confiscation
proceedings from Ibori and Ibori linked cases…” would be paid to DfID
before a penny is returned to Nigeria”.
