…Expert alerts residents
…Mode of operations exposed
By Bose Adelaja & Adetomiwa Adewoyin
CITIZENS COMPASS— A new wave of land grabbing is currently bedeviling the Centre of Excellence, Lagos State, a trend that, if left unchecked, could increase the number of people who have been sent to their early graves.
Investigations revealed that this new form of land grabbing, known as “Land Title Laundry”, involves forging documents and property titles and processing them in some parts of the State, especially in high-brow areas like Ikoyi or Victoria Island.
To checkmate this, the Group Managing Director of the CFL Group, Lai Omotola, on Thursday, alerted Lagosians, saying some sycophants were feeding fat from it.
Addressing a press conference in the Maryland area of the State, Omotola said some financial institutions have fallen victim to this new wave.
He seized the occasion to urge the state government to act fast before the trend gets out of hand.
According to him: Over the years, we have seen and heard of Land title cloning and forgery in Lagos State to obtain millions and billions of naira in return.
A lot of banks fell victim to cloned Lagos CofOs such that they get to discover the forgery only when the loan enters default.
During the tenure of Governor Ambode, he ordered the demolition of the market opposite the government house where forged CofOs are issued, and as of today it’s a pedestrian bridge that passes the Land, and the market is no more.
However, because of the huge money and highly placed persons both inside and outside the government involved, they have perfected a new dimension.
The new scam is what they have renamed Land Title Laundry (LTL)
Mode of operations
They usually look for abandoned land in Ikoyi or Victoria Island because of the high premium attached to property in two highbrow areas. They will look for a prominent name that has passed on to put as the owner of such land. They then go to Oluwole market to forge land certificates backdated to the 70s where documents are no longer available. They prepare this Land certificate outside the government system. Once the document is ready, they have staff in Alausa working in the Land Registry who will insert the documents into the system. Immediately after this is achieved, the title document will automatically become the original. To cure this defect, they will declare the original a lost document and go and swear an affidavit to the Police that the original is lost.
They then proceed to register a Governor’s Consent and make a lot of people believe that the land was allocated by Lagos State.
May I say here, for the avoidance of doubt, that a CofO is different from a Governor’s Consent. A Lagos State CofO is the government allocating you a land and granting you CofO. A Governor consent is the Governor consenting to a transaction between two individuals or entities which clearly means Government is not the owner of the Land and government does not own the Land. The state government, after granting the consent, will state clearly that this consent does not cure any defect in title. If in the future it is detected that there is a forgery or misrepresentation in any of the documents you supplied, the consent will be cancelled.
We know this much because we are about to get out of an ugly experience from similar scammers.
We purchased a property at 24 Adeola Odeku Street in Victoria Island, Lagos. During construction, one company came to the property with the police to seal it up, claiming ownership is with a Governor’s consent. To make a long story short, they claim the original owner of the Land is one Mr. Samuel Oladele Ige, who sold it to Alhaji Ganiyu Amusan, the father of Tayo Amusan, a businessman in Lagos. We decided to scrutinise the documents by first visiting the family of Samuel Ige who was a younger brother to the former Attorney General of the Federation, Chief Bola Ige.,To our surprise the family informed us that their father died in year 2012 and there was no way he could sell the same land in year 2015 and there is nothing in their father’s will to suggest he owns a property at 24 Adeola Odeku street in Victoria Island. We also looked at Alhaji Ganiyu’s claims and found out that he died in 1994, and there was no way he could purchase land in 2015. A further investigation shows that Late Samuel Ige, in 2015, swore to a police affidavit that he lost his original Land certificate. The affidavit, as confirmed by the first son, Niyi, states that the picture on the affidavit is not that of his father, and the same goes for the signature. Also, there is a letter of objection written by the late Samuel Ige before the release of the Governor’s Consent was received by the Land Registry on the 1st of September 2015, when the author of the same letter had died in 2012.
The family of Samuel Ige has petitioned the land registry, and the same registry have found out this claims to be true and issued an invitation for the deregistration of consent to Tayo Amusan. And on two occasions, they refused to attend and instead continued to hide under the protection of security agencies.
We hereby issue a 7 day ultimatum to the registrar of Lands to deregister this consent or face legal suit requesting damages of N5billion because the title which they wrongly issue is what they have used to dispossess us of our land and continue to construct on the land. We have not been the beneficiary of corruption in the system.
Efforts to get the reaction of the State government were unsuccessful as two spokespersons under the Ministry of Land; Ganiu Lawal and LandEkundayo Harry fAdeola were unreachable as of the time of filing this report.
