Smuggling: Ogun Businessman Seeks IG’s Probe of Report against Him

James Sowole in Abeokuta

A popular businessman and hotelier in Ogun State, Mr. Ibrahim Dende Egungbohun, has requested that the Inspector General of Police, IGP. Kayode Egbetokun, should investigate a report that portrayed him as a smuggler and gun runner.

Egungbohun’s petition was sequel to an investigative report published by a reporter with the Foundation for Investigative Journalism (FIJ), Mr. Fisayo Soyombo that accused him of running a smuggling syndicate in the state.

The report also accused Egungbohun, who is popularly known as IBD Dende, of conniving with customs officers to smuggle items such as foreign parboiled rice, poultry products and guns into the country through Ogun State’s border communities.

But, Egungbohun has denied the allegations contained in the report, insisting that he is a customs licensed freight agent with legitimate businesses cutting across hospitality, agriculture, quarry and transportation.

Egungbohun in a letter by his lawyers to the IGP called on the police to urgently investigate the allegations against him and other security agencies.

He described the publication as a malicious report meant to destroy his image.

The letter partly read: “The publications and the documentary fabricated by Fisayo Soyombo in relation to our client, are false in their entirety and they excessively breached the decent fundamentals of public enlightenment, which the freedom of press is constitutionally about.

“It is, therefore, our clients position that the totality of the documentary where our client’s name is criminally featured and the followed-up publications amount to nothing, but character assassination with calculated view to achieve damaging effects against our client in his businesses within and outside Nigeria.

“It is also the position of our client that these orchestrated allegations are designed for the purpose of causing inconvenience, danger, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred and needles anxiety to our client contrary to section 24 of the cybercrimes (prohibition, prevention) Act, 2015.

“In the light of foregoing, we hereby request your office to cause the publications to be investigated with utmost urgency and seriousness, as they have implication not for the person of our client only but for the security architecture of our dear country.”

Egungbohun also faulted the broadcasting of the documentary without establishing the veracity of the report.