SHOCKER: IKEJA HIGH COURT REGISTRAR TURNS EMERGENCY JUDGE

COURT REGISTRAR FREES DANGEROUS CRIMINAL SUSPECTS: ON THE RUN

Femi Ogundare, said to be in his late thirties and an employee of the Lagos State Judiciary is on the run. Well known in the Ikeja High Court as one of the Court Registrars of Honourable Justice Onigbanjo.

Femi Ogundare disappeared from work since august 2015 and from his known residential address when his fraudulent escapades as a Court Registrar blew open inadvertently.

Our investigations reveal that Femi Ogundare has for a long time now, perfected the terrible act of working with yet unknown prison officials to effect the illegal release of accused persons awaiting trial on prison remand.

 The method of the rogue is daring but extremely simple: create a fictional case in the name of a real person in detention, fix a date or dates for the hearing of the fictitious case and after a while forge a ruling in the name of the judge, releasing the accused, on bail or finally discharging and acquitting him.

 Ogundare’s method is an exploitation of the Nigeria Prison Service’s slackness in proper verification of orders and warrants purported to issue from courts of law in the state, regarding prison inmates.

 
The shenanigans of the rogue registrar was exposed accidentally on a certain occasion, when prison officials came to make enquiries about the next adjourned date of the case. They met the wrong person in person of the Senior Registrar of Justice Onigbanjo’s court (name withheld) who searched in vain for the case file of the matter so as to ascertain which dates to give. In the event, the poor senior registrar gave a date in the hope that the “missing file” would be found, before the said date arrived.

From what we further gathered, it was in the while of searching for the “missing file” that a letter of enquiry arrived from the Federal Special Anti Robbery Squad to Justice Onigbanjo’s court about one Emeka Okeke, alleged to have committed serious crimes including attempted murder and armed robbery but who had been purportedly released on bail on the orders of the honourable judge as far back as May 2015.

When Ogundare learnt about this letter, he immediately decided to obey the diction of his fathers which states that “Ko ju maribi gbogbo ara logun e” (To avoid doom, you flee the scene).

But it was not immediately clear to Ogudare’s co-workers that he was implicated in the scam. Nobody was unduly suspicious of his absence from work in the first twenty fours because the High Court was already in the annual vacation period that time. However when his phone lines were no longer going through, alarm bells began to ring. Later when the police visited his home, he had packed out with his family leaving no forwarding address.

Squib surface-to-air geckos reported that the ugly development was a huge shock and embarrassment to Justice Onigbanjo who had been taken on by Ogundare’s perceived industry, confidence and smartness. The judge was said to have lamented that he did not know who to trust again in this world.

Always sharply dressed, the clean shaven Ogundare in his hey days walked with quite some swagger and looked more like an up and coming director of a blue chip company than a civil servant. To account for his “success story” of power dressing and collection of sleek cars, Ogundare’s fib to any who cared to listen is that he was trading in some fast moving commodities, on the side.

There are unverified reports that Ogundare has absconded to Texas, in the United States of America.