PREMIUM TIMES can report that a letter submitted by prominent Nigerian lawyer Mike Ozekhome to a London tribunal to claim ownership of a house in North London was fabricated, adding to an alleged web of forgeries involving the senior advocate.
The letter submitted by Mr Ozekhome was purportedly issued by the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS), authenticating a passport booklet belonging to one Tali Shani.
|
|
The letter, allegedly signed by one Abdulkadir Lawal and described as coming from an Assistant Legal Adviser of the NIS writing on behalf of the Comptroller General of Immigration, affirmed the authenticity of a passport in the name of “Tali Shani” and attached what appeared to be a certified biodata page.
The Nigerian government has since confirmed that the passport never legitimately existed. PREMIUM TIMES can also report that the letter was forged.
|
|
|
|---|
PREMIUM TIMES wrote to the NIS to verify the authenticity of the letter presented by Mr Ozekhome, but the agency has not replied as of the time of filing this report.
The evidence gathered by this newspaper, however, indicates that the letter was forged and subsequently submitted to the UK tribunal by Mr Ozekhome.
Insiders at the NIS told us that a Nigerian government agency independently wrote to the immigration service with an inquiry similar to ours, seeking authentication of the same documents. This newspaper obtained a copy of the letter NIS wrote to the government agency.
“Following a thorough check of the Service’s personnel records and the Directorate of Legal Services, the Nigeria Immigration Service has no record of any officer bearing the name Abdulkadir Lawan serving as an Assistant Legal Adviser or in any legal capacity within the Service,” the NIS stated.
“Accordingly, the said individual is not a staff member of the Nigeria Immigration Service. The Nigerian Immigration Service does not recognise the said document, nor the purported writer as acting under its mandate, authority, or instruction. The contents of the letter are therefore invalid, unauthorised, and of no official effect,” the letter read.
The letter that mattered
The context in which the forged letter was deployed matters significantly in the case
When Dylan Kreolle, a lawyer opposing the UK property transfer, wrote to the NIS seeking to verify the Tali Shani passport, no response was forthcoming.
But when Mr Ozekhome reportedly sought confirmation from the same agency in April 2023, a purported official letter emerged in May 2023 bearing what appeared to be the seal and authority of the NIS, affirming the passport as genuine.
The letter proved decisive in the UK court.
Presiding judge Ewan Paton accepted the authentication and accorded it considerable weight in his September 2025 judgment. “Unlike the fictitious ‘Ms. Tali Shani,” the judge wrote, “a man going by the name of Mr Tali Shani exists and gave evidence before me in that name. A certified copy of an official Nigerian passport was produced both to the Land Registry and this Tribunal, stating that Mr Tali Shani was born on 2nd April 1973. I do not have the evidence, or any sufficient basis, to find that this document — unlike the various poor and pitiful forgeries on the side of the ‘Applicant’ — is forged, and I do not do so.”
What had appeared credible to the judge in that moment would later unravel entirely.
“While the purported confirmation from the NIS did not prove ownership of the property, it did something critically important: it conferred procedural credibility,” said Gideon Christian, a professor of law at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
“It prevented the tribunal from rejecting the identity document outright. It gave Mr Ozekhome a foothold of authenticity on a narrow but decisive evidentiary point. And in doing so, it helped facilitate an attempted transfer built on a contested identity.”
A passport that never existed
Beyond the forged letter, the NIS initially confirmed that the passport at the centre of proceedings — booklet number A07535463, presented in the name of Tali Shani — was never legitimately issued.
In a letter to the ICPC, the agency stated that the booklet was reported stolen, was never personalised, and consequently has no record of a holder in its Electronic Management System.
Its preliminary findings indicated that personal data had been “unlawfully superimposed on it with numerous inconsistencies on the data page, suggesting significant irregularities in its production.”
The property dispute
The property at the centre of this affair is a house at 79 Randall Avenue in North London.
In August 2021, Mr Ozekhome applied to the UK Land Registry to transfer the property into his name, claiming it had been gifted to him by a man presenting himself as Tali Shani, in appreciation for legal services rendered. The application was challenged in September 2022 by Westfields Solicitors, purportedly representing a “Ms Tali Shani,” who claimed to have been the registered owner since 1993 and denied ever signing a transfer.
In his September 2025 ruling, Judge Paton of the First-tier Tribunal (Property Chamber) blocked the transfer and determined that the house had in fact been covertly purchased in 1993 by the late Jeremiah Useni, a retired army general who served as Federal Capital Territory minister under the regime of Nigeria’s late military dictator, Sani Abacha.
The acquisition, the tribunal found, was made under a false identity — “Philips Bincan” — a pattern consistent with findings by the Royal Court of Jersey in a separate 2022 case that exposed Mr Useni’s use of coded names, including “Tim Shani,” to conceal wealth.
Mr Useni, who died in France in January 2025, appeared before the court via video link in 2024. His testimony directly contradicted Mr Ozekhome’s defence. “I owned it. I bought the property. It is my property,” Mr Useni told the court plainly.
Mr Ozekhome, in his own account, admitted he had never known Mr Shani until January 2019, more than two decades after the disputed purchase. He said he had no personal knowledge of how the property had been acquired or managed in earlier years. He told the tribunal that, after being introduced to Mr Shani in 2019, he provided several legal services to him, and that the property was gifted to him in 2021 as an expression of gratitude.
The judge found this account to be a “contrived story… invented in an attempt to provide a plausible reason” for the transfer. Since Mr Shani had no legal title to the property, he could not have transferred it to Mr Ozekhome, the tribunal ruled. Ownership, the tribunal held, now rests with whoever secures probate over Mr Useni’s English estate.
The London tribunal also found that fraudulent Nigerian identity records — including the passport in question, a National Identification Number (NIN), and a Tax Identification Number (TIN) — had allegedly been generated with the connivance of corrupt officials at the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), the Immigration Service, and the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS).
Criminal charges
PREMIUM TIMES previously reported that ICPC filed criminal charges against Mr Ozekhome at the Federal High Court in Abuja in January, following calls for the commission to prosecute the senior lawyer.
The charges were filed by Ngozi Onwuka, Assistant Chief and Head of ICPC’s High Profile Prosecution Department.
Court documents seen by PREMIUM TIMES show that Mr Ozekhome faces three criminal counts.
The first alleges that sometime in August 2021, he directly received House 79 Randall Avenue, purportedly gifted to him by Shani Tali — a transaction the ICPC contends constitutes a felony under the Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Act, 2000.
The second accuses him of making a false document — namely, the Nigerian passport bearing number A07535463 in the name of Shani Tali — with the intent to support a claim of ownership of the London property.
The third alleges that he dishonestly used the false passport as genuine to support the ownership claim, at a time when he had reason to believe the document was false.
Last month, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) separately arraigned Mr Ozekhome and a co-defendant, Ponfa Useni, on 12 charges of forgery and impersonation before the FCT High Court in Maitama, Abuja.
The amended EFCC charges allege that Mr Ozekhome, Ponfa Useni, and the late General Useni conspired in 2020 to make “a false Nigerian International Passport No. A07535463 with the name Tali Shani, and purported same to have been issued by the Nigeria Immigration Service” to lay claim to the London property.
The prosecution further alleges that Ponfa Useni falsely impersonated the fictitious Tali Shani and, with that assumed character, created a Power of Attorney, which Mr Ozekhome then allegedly used to advance his claim. The defendants are also accused of receiving £18,000 in rent from the property.
Among the specific charges is the allegation that Mr Ozekhome made a false document titled: “RE: REQUEST FOR AUTHENTICATION OF NIGERIAN PASSPORT NO. A07535463 BELONGING TO MR. TALI SHANI — dated 4 May 2023 — to support the property claim. ”
That document is the very forged NIS letter at the centre of this report.
Both defendants pleaded not guilty and were granted bail in the sum of N10 million each. The prosecution said the offences contravened provisions of the Penal Code Law, including sections 83, 84, 96, 179, 363, 364, and 366.
Nigerian courts move to seize the property.
In November last year, the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) obtained an order from the Federal High Court in Abuja, freezing the property on the basis that it was shadily acquired in 1993 by the late General Useni. Justice Binta Nyako, who issued the interim forfeiture order, directed that notice be published in a newspaper inviting any party with a legitimate interest in the property to come forward.
When the 14-day window elapsed, no one did.
The CCB reported to the court in January that “no person or entity has come forward to claim the property or establish any legitimate interest.”
READ ALSO: EXCLUSIVE: Nigeria Immigration Service says document Ozekhome gave British court is fake
In a subsequent application filed on 22 December 2025 through its counsel, Sufyan Ahmad, the bureau moved to secure a final forfeiture order, arguing that the property was reasonably suspected to be proceeds of unlawful activity under Sections 17 and 19 of the Proceeds of Crime (Recovery and Management) Act (POCA), 2022.
Ozekhome’s position
In his statement to the ICPC, Mr Ozekhome said he was aware of the UK tribunal’s judgment.
“It was prompted by an objection to my application for the transfer of a property situated at 79 Randall Avenue, London, to me, which was filed by myself and Mr Shani Tali before the HM Land Registry UK. I have seen the judgment now shown to me (albeit an uncertified copy),” he stated.
“This fact about my title to the property, how I came about it, and all have been exhaustively written down and explained to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), and I have no further explanation to the same, all issues having been under investigation by the Commission for many months now.”
Mr Ozekhome added that ownership of the property had been with him since 2021, and that all matters concerning Mr Tali Shani and himself, as regards evidence, could be found in the UK tribunal’s judgment.
