By Steve Agbota, Lagos
The Association of Nigerian Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA) has debunked a report by an online medium alleging that the National Executive Committee members (NECOM) stole the identity of a lawyer to obtain a judgement against the factional Board of Trustees (BOT) headed by Alhaji Taiwo Mustapha in SUIT NO: FHC/AB/CS/109/2021 on January 20, 2022, at the Federal High Court, Abeokuta, Ogun State.
Speaking to Daily Sun on the allegation in Apapa, the acting National President of ANLCA, Dr Kayode Farinto described the report as fictitious and baseless, describing the reporter (Name withheld) as a person who is known to all stakeholders in the industry as one who writes for personal aggrandisement.
However, he described the report as an indictment on the NECOM members’ integrity, this is even as he denied knowing the lawyer mentioned in the report.
He further explained: “NECOM did not to go court in Abeokuta, Ogun state. It was a member of the association, Aliyu Lameen, who took the BoT to court and not the NECOM. The first thing I need to mention is that the man that went to court is one of our members; his name is Alhaji Aliyu Lameen, he took the new BoT to court and the judgement was obtained and in the story, the reporter was saying the expired NECOM may have used the stolen identity of a lawyer to obtain a judgement against the Taiwo Mustapha led faction, so that is an indictment on our part because all the NECOM members have high integrity.
“We are going to give it to our lawyers to address it because the reporter has indicted us. We have said it several times that this journalist is in the habit of writing fictitious stories; stories that are unfounded.
“The purported suit that he has quoted is a case that is coming up next week Monday, so it is different from what happened at Abeokuta, he has mixed it up and the so-called affidavits he displayed on his platform he quoted number 1 to 5 and jumped to no 42, what happened to the numbers in between and we don’t know the authenticity of this document, but we just want to correct the impression that NECOM has done something that is not in line with the procedures.
“And this so-called affidavit; we are seeing it for the first time and we just want the industry to know that the story written by this online medium is fake and he’s always in the habit of writing for personal aggrandizement,” he said.
When asked if it is true that the NECOM actually stole the lawyer’s identity to falsely obtain a certificate of registration from the CAC, he further explained that “that is not true because you will recollect that when Taiwo Mustapha said they got a certificate of registration from CAC, 30 days to the expiration of their tenure through the back doors and we wrote to the CAC that this certificate that Taiwo Mustapha is parading, so CAC issued a letter cancelling the certificate, so Taiwo Mustapha went to court suing CAC and NECOM, in that court ruling they lost out because the ruling, in that case, is that they should come back to NECOM for arbitration, after failing to come for arbitration, seven months after we filed the ruling to CAC stating our new board members and CAC informed that the association was owing about seven years remittance, we paid the remittance, made another advert and the CAC gave us another certificate on September 7, 2022.
“And the Taiwo Mustapha-led group has been claiming that they have a so-called letter of cancellation, when their cancellation is done we have a letter written to us, so if they have any letter cancelling our certificate, let them present it,” he said.
