...His failed law firm turned into an estate agency
Just like many who fell to the wily ways of disgraced former
chairman of Skye Bank Plc, Tunde Ayeni, one of Nigeria’s foremost businessmen
and founder and chairman of the Honeywell Group, Oba Otudeko, discovered his
(Ayeni) true nature when it was a tad too late.
The Forbes-rated billionaire and former chairman of FBN
Holdings PLC had almost sealed a multibillion naira deal involving the take-over
of ALCON Nig. LTD, a Port-Harcourt-based Engineering, Procurement, Construction
(EPC) Contracting company. ALCON, with
over 35 years of experience, is regarded as a highly esteemed organization
providing services in the civil, mechanical, electrical and instrumentation
fields with excellent performance and sound proven records of projects executed
and under execution.
The deal looked like it was dropping on Otudeko’s laps and
everybody around him saw it as the perfect icing on the cake of his many
lucrative investments. Then, like a bolt from the blues, Ayeni emerged and
bought over the company. It was a major business coup that had the old man
reeling. He has not forgiven or forgotten that deep cut inflicted on him by a
supposed younger friend. And it is one reason he has told anybody who cares to
listen that Ayeni is like a devil and whoever wants to dine with him must come
with a long spoon.
Effectively, Ayeni destroyed whatever pre-existing or
prospective relationship Otudeko had with the company, just like he destroyed
Aso Savings and Loans. It would be recalled that the financial services
institution providing mortgage banking products and services was brought to its
knees by Ayeni who was a majority shareholder and chairman of the institution
before he was sacked. Among other offences bordering on money laundering and
financial impropriety, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, in
2015, arrested Ayeni for fraud involving the former Minister of FCT, Bala
Mohammed. He was asked to refund the N1billion his bank allegedly passed to Mr.
Mohammed in unclear circumstances.
He was also accused of hiding N9.8bn belonging to the
Federal Government of Nigeria. According to the Independent Corrupt Practices
and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), the money, realised from the sale
of government assets, was illegally deposited in Aso Savings and Loans Plc
which he embezzled.
An ex-director of Aso Savings, Maimuna Aliyu, in a lengthy
petition to the ICPC stated, among other allegations including a threat to her
life, “Tunde Ayeni has contributed to the bankruptcy of the Bank in no small
measure and other BANKS that he has chaired or acted as co-owner by proxy.”
Indeed, as Aliyu stated, Ayeni leaves a trail of destruction
on every company he invests in. Skye Bank PLC was a thriving financial
institution until Ayeni came on board as chairman in 2011. Five years later,
the bank was barely surviving as Ayeni had plundered it comatose. He would
later confess to the EFCC that, indeed, he misappropriated billions of naira of
depositors’ funds. Ayeni, alongside top members of the bank, was
unceremoniously removed by the Central Bank of Nigeria in July 2016 when it was
discovered that they had run the bank aground. He is currently working on a
plea bargain with the Nigerian government.
The inability to sustain his leadership of the
aforementioned companies may be why even his law firm, Olatunde Ayeni &
Company originally established in the year 1994 but rechristened
Legal Resources Alliance (better known as LRA), has mutated
into an estate agency firm. Though a trained lawyer, Ayeni’s inability to build
a business from scratch has hampered the trajectory of the company. Its Lagos
office is now a go-to shop for the average Joe looking for property to lease or
buy.
If friendship is a form of love with trust as its
foundation; it is not so for Ayeni. His former buddy and collaborator, John
Darlington, the ex-managing director of defunct Bond Bank, also found out the
hard way. Darlington was the kind of man who believed that if he got lost at
sea, whoever he calls his friend should sail day and night to find him. He held
same thought about Ayeni but the latter didn’t.
A highflying banker in the early to mid-2000s, Edo
State-born Darlington was the go-to banker for his businessmen-friends and
associates as he freely doled out loans to them. Ayeni was reported to have
benefitted immensely from their relationship. Sooner, Darlington ran into
troubled waters with the federal government over his relationship and involvement
in the corruption allegations levelled against the former Inspector General of
Police (IGP), Tafa Balogun. From his Olympian height of fame and fortune, he
came crashing down to bare earth. He would later escape death by a whisker
following a brain surgery performed on him at a London hospital.
Darlington was out in the cold. He looked right, left and
centre and the only person that could bail him out of the hole he had sunk was
his emerging billionaire friend, Ayeni. He ran to Ayeni, cap in hand and begged
for a lifeline. Instead of helping him bounce back, however, Ayeni employed him
as a director in Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company where he was a
chairman until his removal recently.
It was a further fall from grace to grass that earned Darlington
scorn and jeers from associates who could not fathom how he had to end up
working for his friend. Darlington took everything in his strides until he had
to resign about a year later when he could no longer bear the taunting from
peers and the ill-treatment and derision he got from Ayeni.
Indeed, those who know Ayeni intimately say despite always
mouthing ‘God bless you’ whatever the situation is, he is ruthless and no
friend or associate, no matter how close they are, is immune from his treachery
and backbiting. While life is currently happening to Tunde with his removal as
chairman of Skye Bank Plc and the IBEDC, Darlington has gone on to establish JD
Capital, an alternative investment boutique oriented towards the West African
market and specialized in private equity, venture capital and advisory
services.
Like Otudeko and Darlington, kinsmen of the late former
Governor of Bayelsa State, Chief Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, under the aegis of
the Bayelsa Natives in Nigeria and the Diaspora, B.A.N.N.D, have also accused
Ayeni of betrayal. This is contained in a recent widely circulated statement
wherein the group alleged that despite all that the former governor did to
empower Ayeni, he has only repaid him by maliciously lying on his memory and
abandoning his family.
“It came to our notice that when the Economic and Financial
Crimes Commission, EFCC, arrested Tunde Ayeni for withdrawing N29billion from
Skye Bank, he lied to the agency that he gave the money as a bribe to our
brother and illustrious son of the Niger Delta, Chief Diepreye Alamieyeseigha.
That is callous and gratuitous. At no time, as far as we know, did Chief
Alamieyeseigha have that amount of money in any bank whether in Nigeria or
abroad. He was a simple man of the people who gave back to the society that
made him. He coveted no riches and he led a simple life.
“What Tunde Ayeni did was to just lie on a dead man who
cannot defend himself. This is a betrayal of the friendship we are aware that
they maintained while the former governor was alive. Ayeni merely played to the
gallery and decided to call a dog a bad name in order to hang it. This is not
what friendship is about. And we have no doubt that the man (the former
governor) must be turning in his grave at this deliberate and disdainful
desecration of his memory.”
It would later emerge that the N29billion was allegedly used
to buy over the moribund national telecoms carrier, NITEL, and its mobile
subsidiary, MTEL, from the federal government in 2014 and birthed Ntel, a
transaction the group has called on the federal government to investigate.
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