Duport’s Ex-employee Testifies against MD in Alleged N150m Bribery Trial

Alex Enumah in Abuja

A former employee of Duport Midstream Company Limited, Mrs Oyinlola Dairo, yesterday gave evidence in the alleged bribery trial of the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the company, Mr Akintoye Akindele.
Akindele is standing trial on a one-count charge of bribing a police officer in order to compromise his investigation on alleged diversion of the sum of $5,636,397.01, belonging to Summit Oil International Ltd.

Justice Modupe Osho-Adebiyi, of a High Court of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), hearing the case had last month adjourned for further hearing and cross examination of  Dairo, who is the second Prosecution Witness (PW2).

The witness who at the last proceedings stated that she left the company, last year, because she was no longer comfortable with a lot of things about her company in the social media, explained to the court how she was constrained to sign a payment of N50 million to Summit Oil International Limited.
At the resumed trial, the witness recalled that while still working at Duport, she had on August 15, last year received a WhatsApp chat from one Dr Ponmile of Platform Capital Ltd, a company under Duport in respect of a memo she was supposed to prepare.
The witness who claimed to have headed the commercial section of Duport and had as responsibilities; drafting of  contracts, management of product sales, commercial support, amongst others, explained that because it was her consulting day at the hospital one Joshua forwarded the memo to her to append her signature.

She said after going through the memo she discovered that although the instruction was that the sum of N50 million be paid to Summit Oil, however, the money was to be paid into an account other than that of Summit Oil.
“The company was supposed to pay Summit but there was another beneficiary listed (Lisdom) and I did not understand.
“I called Joshua who sent the memo to say, it was not clear. I asked a number of questions. I asked if there was an agent. I asked  if the proceed of Summit had been assigned to Lisdom,” the witness informed the court.

She added that when Joshua was unable to answer her questions, she called  Ponmile to say she did not understand the memo and as such cannot append her signature. “Since I cannot reconcile, I refused to sign”, she added.

Dairo further said that when her bosses were calling her persistently over the memo, she had to check the profile of Lisdom using Google and discovered that the firm had nothing to do with Oil and Gas but hospitality, “So I was constrained to sign”.

However, during cross examination by Akindele’s lawyers led by Mrs Funmi Quadri (SAN), the witness responding to question on the defendant’s payment to Summit, answered that such payments were usually in bits not in full, adding that the payments were for field services and lifting crude for export which were sold to Shell Petroleum.

When asked if she was aware Duport was always paying community, she explained that she was not in a position to answer the question because the community issue was been handled by a different person.

When confronted with the memo showing that there’s was an approval to pay the sum of N50 million to Summit Oil, the witness said she could not marry the approval because there are two different beneficiaries – Summit and Lisdom.

She also could not confirm that the defendant was in the custody of the police when the approval to pay the N50 million was made, but recalled that her former boss was arrested some time in July last year.

Also when confronted with the fact that nowhere in her chat with Ponmile, did she complain that she would not be able to sign the memo, the witness stated that her complaint was made verbally through the telephone.

Meanwhile, the memo on payment to Summit Oil and the chat between the witness and Ponmile, obtained by police investigators were admitted as exhibits B1 and B2, after they were tendered by Akindele’s lawyer.

At the end of cross examination and the witness discharged from the witness box, Osho-Adebiyi adjourned till May 14, for continuation of trial.