FIJ
A Lagos High Court has found the sale of a property used by Otunba Adedoyin Olayide Ogunde, a deceased Union Bank customer, as collateral for a loan taken in 1995, as fraudulent.
Justice I.O. Harrison of Court 18, Lagos State High Court, delivered a judgement in a case instituted by the beneficiaries of the estate of Ogunde against the bank on May 31.
Ogunde, the owner of the buildings, died in 1997. He had not liquidated a N7 million loan taken from Union Bank on May 23, 1995 and for which he had mortgaged his compound of buildings located at 6 Moore road, off Bourdillion road, Ikoyi, Lagos State. Ikoyi is a pricey area in Lagos that is home to multibillionaires.
The property consisted eight units of four-bedroom flats and a penthouse, a 10-bedroom family house and a three-storeyed building consisting 3-bedroom flats.
To recover its money, the bank sold the property through a private treaty without a recourse to the procedural steps dictated by applicable mortgage laws.
FRAUDULENT SALE AND COURT LITIGATION
Before his death, Ogunde had prepared a final will and appointed some individuals as personal representatives and executors of the will.
Ogunde mortgaged the property as a single entity. But the bank divided it into pieces and sold it to different buyers as different entities. Meanwhile, the bank had told the deceased’s personal representatives that it was not going to partition the property before sale because it was mortgaged as a single entity.
With the knowledge of the personal representatives, the bank sold the mini estate while Ogunde’s children were mostly infants. When they became of age, they asked the court to declare the sale of their father’s property by the bank illegal.
Several years after the case, numbered LD/2624/1999, was originally filed, the trial commenced on September 18, 2018, according to the certified true copy of the judgement obtained by FIJ.
In the suit, the Ogunde family contended that the sale and the processes relied on by the bank to dispose of their benefactor’s property was characterised by fraud and collusion.
Represented by O.V. Ekundayo, a legal practitioner, the family told the court that the assets were of a higher value than what the bank placed on it, and that there was a collusion between the bank and the purchasers.
Built on 2.2 acres of land, the bank partitioned the property into Plots 6A, 6B, 6C and 6D. Plot A had nine flats and eight-roomed boys-quarters and sold to Cletus Ibeto, the chairman of Ibeto Group, a local company involved in cement production and other products, at an undervalued price of N30 million.
THIS STORY FIRST APPEARED IN FIJ
