The Nigerian lower house is full of shady characters as espoused by a
recent revelation by the Supreme Court of Georgia in the US.
Saharareporters found out that On February 26 2007 the highest court in
the state of Georgia ordered that Femi Gbaja with state bar number 288330
be suspended from the practice of law for 36 months.
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.
Femi Gbaja as he was known 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 2010.