A former member of the House of Representatives Farouk Lawan who was sentenced to five years imprisonment for demanding and accepting a $500,000 bribe has regained his freedom.
Lawan was convicted and sentenced to prison in 2021 for soliciting and accepting a $500,000 bribe from Femi Otedola, Chairman, Zenon Petroleum and Gas Ltd, while serving as chairman of the House of Representatives ad-hoc committee investigating fuel subsidy fraud in 2012.
“Today marks the beginning of a new chapter in my life as I step out of Kuje Custodial Centre, with a heart full of gratitude to Allah SWT for seeing me through this trial,” Lawan noted in a statement he issued on Tuesday.
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In a unanimous judgment, a five-member panel affirmed the 2022 judgment of the Court of Appeal which upheld Lawan’s sentencing to five years in respect of only count three on the three-count charge on which he was tried at the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory.
In the lead judgment prepared by Justice John Okoro but read by Justice Tijjani Abubakar, the apex court found that Lawan’s appeal was without merit and proceeded to dismiss it.
The Judge ordered him to refund $500.000 dollars to the federal government.
Lawan’s subsidy scam
In January 2012, Lawan chaired the House of Representatives committee that investigated the Nigerian government’s fuel subsidies.
The committee was set up in the wake of nationwide strikes in Nigeria after President Goodluck Jonathan removed a fuel subsidy. This resulted in the increase in price of fuel.
The committee’s report released in April the same year indicated a huge scam in which Nigerian fuel companies were being paid hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies by the government for fuel that was never delivered. It was estimated the scam cost the country $6.8 billion.
In February 2013, Lawan was charged with corruption after he allegedly accepted $500,000 from Femi Otedola, a Nigerian billionaire oil tycoon, as part of a $3 million bribe Lawan had solicited from Otedola. Otedola claimed that Lawan demanded the bribe in order to have his company, Zenon, removed from the list of companies that the committee had implicated in the scandal. The initial fuel subsidy report said that Zenon owed more than $1 million to the government, but legislators later voted to remove the firm from the final report.
Lawan said that he accepted the money in order to expose blackmail and informed the committee and Economic and Financial Crimes Commission about it.
On 22 June 2021, the trial of Farouk Lawan came to a logical conclusion as the judge, Angela Otaluka, sentenced the former federal lawmaker to seven years in prison.
Otaluka, a judge of the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory, Apo, Abuja, jailed Lawan for corruptly demanding $3 million and eventually taking $500,000 bribe while serving as the chairman of the House of Representatives’ ad-hoc committee investigating the fraud around fuel subsidy in 2012.
In her judgment, Otaluka relied heavily on the testimony of Otedola, who described giving the $500,000 to Lawan in a sting operation planned with the State Security Service to obtain evidence of extortion against the lawmaker.
He went to the court of appeal and the sentencing was reduced to five years. The Supreme Court upheld his conviction on January 26, 2024, after he appealed the initial seven-year sentence given by the trial court.
The trial court based its judgment on the testimony of Otedola, who cooperated with the State Security Service to expose Lawan’s corruption.
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