Two Lagos-based lawyers, Messrs Tayo Oyetibo (SAN)
and Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa, representing a former Niger Delta militant, Government
Ekpemupolo, alias Tompolo, who is on the run, have said it is not their duty to
produce him before the Federal High Court in Lagos.
They pointed to Paragraph 3(b) of the Federal High
Court Practice Direction 2013, which provided that, “On the date of first
arraignment, the prosecutor must produce the accused person in court.”
There is a pending 40-count of alleged N45.9bn fraud
against Tompolo and nine others before Justice Ibrahim Buba, where the suspects
were expected to take their plea.
But while his alleged accomplices had been attending
court, Tompolo had repeatedly snubbed court summons served on him, making the
judge to issue two separate warrants for his arrest.
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, which
charged Tompolo to court, had subsequently declared him wanted through a
newspaper advertorial and also obtained a court order to confiscate all his
assets, pending when he would submit himself to the authority of the court.
Oyetibo and Adegboruwa had, however, gone before the
Court of Appeal, seeking to void the arrest warrant issued against their
client.
In a statement jointly signed by them on Wednesday,
the two lawyers said it was the duty of the EFCC, and not theirs, to fish out
Tompolo and bring him to court.
The statement was issued in a reaction to the
editorial of a national daily (not The PUNCH), suggesting that the lawyers, who
had been taking instructions from Tompolo, apparently knew where he was and
ought to be mandated to produce him, since efforts by security agencies to
arrest him had not yielded any result.
The editorial had reportedly suggested that the
lawyers owed Nigerians the duty to produce Tompolo, who is on the run, failure
of which they ought to be disciplined by the court for professional misconduct.
But the lawyers described such a suggestion as a
misconception, stressing that they had not breached any law to warrant being
sanctioned as suggested in the said editorial.
They berated the newspaper for sitting as a judge
over a matter which was already before the court and advised it to always “seek
proper legal advice before embarking on passing judgment upon matters bordering
on law and procedure so as to avoid falling into the type of grave error of
judgment they committed on this occasion.”
They added that their client had the right to appeal
any order of court against him, citing the case of Fawehinmi Vs
Attorney-General of Lagos State (1989), where the Court of Appeal held that
accused persons were entitled in law to take their objection to the charge,
irrespective of the fact that they were not physically present in court.
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