Date Published: 10/01/09

CAC Official, 3 Others in EFCC net over fraud

No fewer than four members of a forgery syndicate including an official of the Corporate Affairs Commission, CAC were on Wednesday arrested in Abuja by operatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC.

The suspects namely Emmanuel Nwaroh, Akeju Tolulope, Abiodun Awolumate and Aliu Abdullai were arrested following a report that they run a ring that helps people to forge CAC documents in exchange for large sums of money.

Trouble began for the syndicate when CAC reported the case of two lawyers suspected to be involved in the forgery of a Certificate of Registration of Increase in Share Capital of an engineering firm in Abuja.

Acting on the report, EFCC operatives moved swiftly to arrest the two lawyers. One of them, Rotimi Ogunjide upon his arrest said he was contacted to do the job but gave it to another lawyer to help out due to his busy schedule. His statement led to the arrest of the second lawyer, Ihejirika George .

Ihejirika in his statement said he also gave the job to one Emmanuel Nwaroh who he claimed he met when the latter was on industrial training at the CAC. His own statement led to the arrest of Emmanuel within the premises of the CAC . The 25 year old corps member posted to Bauchi state, confessed that he was given the job of forging the Share Capital Certificate of the company but that he also gave the job to one Emeka who is now at large.

EFCC operatives were able to establish that the syndicate was contacted when the said company wanted to bid for a contract and was told to have its Share Capital base increased from100million to 250million units. The company then contacted Ogunjide to help process the document with the Corporate Affairs Commission. Upon receiving the original certificate which contained the company’s share base of 100 million units, the lawyer thereafter contacted another lawyer, George who in turn contacted Emmanuel to help hasten the process since he once served as an IT student at the CAC.

In his statement, Emmanuel told operatives that George promised to pay him N240,000 for the job The amount was later paid into his bank account. He then invited four other members of his ring to join him to do the job. Since the job involves producing a certificate, an expert in certificate printing was contacted. Akeju Tolulope, a 58 years old man also popularly called “C in C” came in. He was paid N7000 and given a flash drive containing all the details by Emmanuel to clone a Share Certificate on behalf of the said company.

Akeju went ahead and printed the certificate. To authenticate the deal, Akeju also produced a fake Zenith Bank teller with N240, 000 on to facilitate the processing when it gets into the CAC system. After the production of the certificate and teller, Emmanuel brought in another member, Awolumate Abiodun who is an IT consultant with the Information Management Department of the CAC. Abiodun was paid N40, 000 to help input the certificate into the system. The process will however not be completed without taking it through the CAC registry, and that was when Aliu Abdullahi, another suspect who works in the Registry Department got his own role in the deal. Aliu was given N15,000 to help pass the copy of the Share Capital Certificate through the Registry for final approval by the CAC.

The process however suffered a setback when the CAC authorities noticed some disparities between the forged documents and the original copies produced by CAC. The prompted the report to EFCC which moved in swiftly to arrest the suspects who are being detained for further investigation.

Other forged documents recovered from members of the ring include value added tax (VAT) certificates, states tax clearance certificates , Zenith Bank Tellers with fake stamps, and income tax certificates.