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Abdulrasheed Maina, the former Chairman of the defunct Pension Reform Task Team (PRTT), failed to appear before the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) High Court in Asokoro, Abuja, on Thursday, once again stalling a trial-within-trial convened to determine the admissibility of his extrajudicial statements to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
The development drew a sharp rebuke from trial judge Abubakar Kutigi who threatened to revoke Mr Maina’s bail and warned that he would not allow his court to be mocked.
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“If your client cannot come to court, I will revoke his bail and let them go and get him,” Mr Kutigi told the defence lawyer. “The last time he appeared in court was more than three years ago. I am fed up with this case. I’ve been in this profession for over 35 years. I have never seen a case like this.”
EFCC is prosecuting Mr Maina, already an ex-convict, alongside Ann Igwe Olachi, a civil servant, on nine counts of receiving stolen funds totalling N738 million. Both defendants denied wrongdoing when they were arraigned in 2019.
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A statement by EFCC spokesperson Dele Oyewale said Thursday’s proceedings were thrown into further disarray when Mr. Maina’s new lead counsel, A.I. Lemu, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), appeared before the court, admitting he had only just been briefed about the case and did not even have a copy of the charges against his client.
“I am coming into this matter anew. I don’t even have the charges. I don’t have the history of this case. I was briefed on the phone to take over the case,” Mr Lemu told the court, requesting a two-week adjournment to familiarise himself with the proceedings.
‘Trial frustration antics’
The judge, visibly frustrated, noted what he described as the “antics” of the defence as a deliberate strategy to frustrate his court. However, in the interest of fair hearing, he granted Mr Lemu the two-week relief he sought while issuing a stern warning.
“I would not allow a senior advocate to come and make a mockery of this court,” the judge said. “I will give you two weeks to study the matter, and for the trial-within-trial to commence. If he is not in court during the trial-within-trial, I will revoke his bail.”
Mr Kutigi also noted the high turnover of lawyers representing Mr Maina, a pattern he said significantly contributed to the case’s stagnation. Mr Lemu, for his part, pledged to remain on the case to the end. “Hopefully, I will be the last lawyer to appear in this case,” he said.
The judge reminded the court that Mr Maina was released from prison on 25 February 2025, after completing a sentence for money laundering, yet had not appeared in court a single time since his release.
Earlier this month, Mr Maina’s then-counsel, identified as Achibong, had appeared before Justice Kutigi and presented a hospital referral letter to seek an adjournment, even though the document did not indicate any illness.
The judge had at the time refused the adjournment, disclosing that he had secured a commitment from the defence chambers to proceed with or without Mr Maina’s presence.
“The antics have stalled proceedings completely,” Mr Kutigi had said in early February, warning he was considering revoking bail to compel the former pension boss to take his trial seriously.
On Thursday, the prosecution counsel made two applications.
The first sought to strike out the defence’s objection to the voluntariness of the defendants’ statements, given the first defendant’s continued absence which made the sub-trial impossible to conduct. The second application sought a court order compelling Mr Maina to bear the cost incurred by the prosecution in transporting equipment to court for replaying video recordings of the defendants’ extrajudicial statements.
The defence counsel, Mr Lemu, also filed an application challenging the court’s jurisdiction to entertain the case, arguing that Mr Maina had already been convicted and had served his jail term. The prosecution acknowledged the application and promised to file its response at the next adjourned date.
Mr Kutigi adjourned the matter until 9 March, for commencement of the trial-within-trial and hearing on the jurisdiction application.
Backstory
Mr Maina was convicted in November 2021 and sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment by Okon Abang, then of the Federal High Court, Abuja, for money laundering offences involving over N2 billion in pension funds. Mr Abang has since been elevated to the Court of Appeal bench.
In his judgement, Mr Abang condemned Mr Maina’s treatment of Nigerian pensioners in unusually stark terms. “Some have suffered and died while waiting for their reward,” the judge said, adding that “the facts of this case are sordid, immoral, and morbid” and that they “portray the moral decadence in Nigeria.”
Three of Mr Maina’s biological siblings — two sisters and a brother — appeared in court as prosecution witnesses and testified against him.
READ ALSO: EFCC re-arraigns Malami, wife, son on money laundering charges
His two sisters told the court how he fraudulently obtained their personal details and utility bills to open bank accounts for his company, Common Input Property and Investment Ltd, which he used to perpetrate the fraud. The company was also convicted and ordered wound up by the court.
The Court of Appeal upheld the conviction and sentence in May 2023. Mr Maina was subsequently released on February 25, 2025, on account of good conduct in prison, according to the Nigerian Correctional Service.
Last month, a cross-border investigation by PREMIUM TIMES uncovered how Mr Maina allegedly amassed properties worth over $1.3 million in the United States and Dubai between 2010 and 2013 — the same period during which the Nigerian government accused him of siphoning millions of dollars from the pension fund he was meant to safeguard.
