The UK High Court of Justice at King’s Bench Division has granted a forfeiture order on a property occupied by the Lord Mayor of Leeds, Abigail Katung, According PREMIUM TIMES report.
The court ordered the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) to take possession of and recover the property, which was originally owned by a wealthy businessman, Mansoor Hussain. Investigators have previously accused him of being a money launderer for major crime lords in the north of England.
Mrs. Katung, the wife of Sunday Katung, Nigerian senator representing Kaduna South Senatorial District, currently occupies the property with her two children.
She had signed a contract of sale agreement in 2015, the year her husband was first elected to the House of Representatives, to buy the property from Mr. Hussain at an agreed price of £1,000,000.
As part of the deal, Mrs. Katung made a deposit of £400,000 in two tranches: £40,000 in the first and £360,000 in the second, which were paid to Mr. Hussain’s bank account.
UK court filings suggested money laundering activities in Mrs. Katung’s initial deposit, which was made between April and May 2015, several days after her husband’s election and days before his June inauguration as a lawmaker.
The UK High Court investigated the source of £360,000 originating from Nigeria, with Mrs. Katung explaining that due to new government policies in 2015, she used the black market to transfer funds from Nigeria to England. She said some of the funds were sourced by her husband.
However, there are questions regarding the transfer process, and Mrs. Katung did not disclose documentation to prove that the transaction was lawful.
In an oral interview, she told the court that her husband obtained a loan of N120 million from a Nigerian bank and then used Bureau De Change operators (BDCs) in Nigeria to exchange naira into pounds sterling and remit it to a Barclays bank account in the name of 1st Resource, a company owned by Mrs. Katung.
Mrs. Katung sent the court extracts from bank statements purportedly showing transfers her husband made to Bureau De Change operators in Nigeria, who then used agents in the UK to get the money to her via her company’s account at 1st Resource.
The judge held that the use of Mrs. Katung’s company for the purpose of that transaction was improper, but the Mayoress of Leeds maintained that she did that because it was easier to transfer from a company account than a personal account.
The court also found that the majority of payments made into the bank account of 1st Resource could not have been from UK agents of BDCs in Nigeria.
Mrs. Katung told the court that, in addition to the agents, she relied to a limited extent on family and friends to assist her with currency exchanges and make the payments.
Not satisfied with Mrs. Katung’s oral explanation and that of her lawyer, the judge said she should prepare her defence and provide an “adequate, documented explanation” of what happened in 2015.
“She has failed to do that,” the judge said, adding, “It was incumbent on her to take proactive steps to ensure that a properly evidenced account was given to the Court.”
“Surprisingly, Mrs. Katung’s witness statements in these proceedings did not address how the payments were made, nor did they seek to explain what she had said at interview. More surprisingly, Mrs. Katung has disclosed very little documentation which bears on these transfers, and there is no witness statement from her husband. These are telling omissions from which I draw an adverse inference,” the judge said.
At the hearing, Mrs. Katung sought to rely on an attestation from one Mubarak Suleiman of My Honey Oil Interbiz Ltd, which purports to prove that her husband was a client of Honey Oil and a licensed Bureau De Change in Nigeria.
However, using open-source research, investigators said the Central Bank of Nigeria’s list of licensed Bureau De Change operators as of June 2021 shows no trace of Honey Oil.
Therefore, the judge ruled that Mrs. Katung was only “conducting a business in foreign exchange transactions to circumvent Nigerian foreign exchange regulations and/or to avoid a punitive exchange rate.”
The judge added that he was satisfied on the “balance of probabilities” that some of the BDCs mentioned by Mrs. Katung were not even licensed to undertake foreign exchange transactions in Nigeria.
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