Ibori Moves To Quash Graft Conviction At European Court

Ibori Moves To Quash Graft Conviction At European Court

Chief James Onanefe Ibori, former governor of Delta State, has taken the United Kingdom to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, in a bid to quash his conviction by a London court.

The former governor, who lost an appeal against his conviction in London, had pleaded guilty in a London court in 2012 to 10 counts of fraud and money-laundering involving sums amounting to at least 50 million pounds ($66 million).

He received a 13-year jail sentence of which he served half.

He appealed his conviction based on the allegation that the British police and prosecutors had been involved in activities that tainted the judicial process.

He also said the identified corrupt British police officers were responsible for the conduct of the case against him, adding that they deliberately withheld prosecution evidence which, had it been disclosed at the proper time, would have prevented any guilty plea being entered.

He further said the prosecution failed to follow the legally required Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (‘RIPA’) procedure as stipulated in British law.

The attestation papers, in respect of the current move by the former governor to quash the charges, were received by the European court on April 16, 2019, and were premised on the fact that Britain disobeyed its own laws, all in a rush to get him convicted.

His counsel argued that the application concerned an unusual provision of United Kingdom law: s17 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (‘RIPA’) and prohibits any reference, in any proceedings, to an intercepted communication or its contents- e.g. an intercepted phone call – in circumstances in which its origin as an intercepted communication is disclosed or could be inferred.

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Ibori’s counsel alleged that the operation of s17 of RIPA, as applied in the highly unusual circumstances of his case, resulted in a violation of Ibori’s rights pursuant to Article 6 of ECHR, adding that Britain’s failure to obey its own laws had rendered every other thing that followed, including Ibori’s guilty plea later, defective.

His counsel also said his client had pleaded guilty to criminal offences but subsequently applied for permission to appeal his convictions in light of the disclosure of new material. It is this ‘new material’ which surfaced later that Ibori is predicating the present appeal on.

Ibori’s counsel further said, in the case filed at the EU Court of Human Rights, that at one of the court’s sittings, “Ms Sasha WASS QC (‘SWQC’), who had previously been instructed to prosecute the applicant (Ibori), sent a note to the Court of Appeal (‘the Wass Note’).

The counsel further argued: “It was a highly unusual note because it provided information, which could easily identify the source of the new material on which the applicant’s appeal was based. However, in a reverse twist, such disclosure is prohibited in all court proceedings by s17 of RIPA.

In response to the Wass Note, and in an effort to attempt to comply with s17 of RIPA for the remainder of the hearing, the Court of Appeal imposed ‘Ground Rules’ on the parties. This limited what the applicant’s counsel could refer to in his submissions.

“The applicant submitted to the Court of Appeal – and submits in this application – that s17 of RIPA, combined with the ‘Ground Rules’, prevented him from properly developing his submissions before the Court of Appeal. As a result, his appeal hearing was unfair.”

The counsel added that Ibori appealed to the EU Court of Appeal because a London Appeal Court refused to interrogate this submission and actually ruled that the issue of what is now known as “the Wass Note” was a no-go area.

This made Ibori to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights because Britain denied him his rights to fair trial – which is recognised everywhere in the free world.