The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, yesterday informed the Justice Idris Mohammed-led Federal High Court sitting in Lagos that embattled Senior Advocate of Nigeria, SAN, Rickey Tarfa lied about his age.
The anti-graft agency made the disclosure while urging the court to not to entertain Tarfa’s renewed and better-written affidavit filed in support of his N2.5bn suit.
Moving a counter-affidavit to Tarfa’s application seeking to tender the new affidavit in support of the case, EFCC’s counsel, Wahab Shittu said, “He who comes to equity must come with clean hands.”
The commission’s operative identified as Moses Awolusi, informed the court that though the embattled Senior Advocate gave his age as 43 in the statement he made to the EFCC on the day of his arrest, it was however discovered that Tarfa’s real age is 54.
Awolusi said, “I know as a fact that the applicant, in his extrajudicial statement to the 1st respondent upon his arrest, falsely stated that his age was 43 years in the document marked Exhibit 1 to the counter-affidavit of the 1st respondent dated 18th February, 2016, whereas the true age of the applicant, as stated in the compendium published for all Senior Advocates of Nigeria referred to, is 54 years old.”
Praying the court to discountenance the claim by the EFCC, Tarfa’s counsel, Chief Bolaji Ayorinde, SAN, said anyone could misrepresent his age under the kind of treatment that the EFCC subjected his client to on the day of his arrest.
“In such a situation, I would put my age at 25 because I will be under shock,” Ayorinde said.
Ayorinde argued that what the EFCC needed to concentrate on was how it would debunk Tarfa’s claim that an Access Bank account into which his law firm paid N225,000 on January 7, 2014 belonged to one Mohammed Awal Yunusa and not Justice Mohammed Nasir Yunusa as the EFCC had claimed.
Tarfa’s counsel prayed the court to admit Mohammed Awal Yunusa’s further and better-written affidavit in support of his client’s N2.5bn fundamental rights enforcement suit against the EFCC, saying it was in the interest of justice to do so.
EFCC’s counsel, Shittu, however described Tarfa’s application as an abuse of court processes and a ploy to arrest the judgment of the court.
Shittu said Tarfa who had earlier admitted paying N225,000 to the judge and had also falsified his age and as such does not deserve the discretionary favour of the court.
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