State v. Okonkwo – Section 419 Fraud Acquittal

Our client, the managing director of a mid-sized Lagos import–export company, was arrested following a petition filed at the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) by a former business associate. The petition alleged that he had collected ₦45 million as part-payment for a consignment of industrial equipment that was never delivered, and that this amounted to obtaining money under false pretences contrary to Section 1(1) of the Advance Fee Fraud and Other Fraud Related Offences Act 2006 and Section 419 of the Criminal Code.

On the face of the petition, the case looked straightforward for the prosecution: money had changed hands, a memorandum of understanding had been signed, and the goods had not arrived. The complainant’s statement painted a picture of a businessman lured into parting with a substantial sum on the strength of promises that were never honoured. Within weeks, our client was arraigned before the High Court of Lagos State on a two-count charge carrying a maximum sentence of seven years’ imprisonment.

The reputational exposure was immediate and severe. As a director of a company that depended on trust with banks, suppliers and freight partners, even an unresolved fraud charge threatened to unravel years of relationships. Several existing clients placed pending orders on hold once news of the arraignment spread within the trade community.

When the matter came to us, the prosecution had already opened its case and called its first witness — the complainant himself. We were instructed to take over the defence at short notice, review the full case file, and build a strategy capable of withstanding four prosecution witnesses and a stack of documentary exhibits, including bank statements, the signed MOU, and a chain of WhatsApp messages between our client and the complainant.

The first task was to separate what the prosecution had alleged from what it could actually prove. Advance fee fraud is a specific-intent offence — it is not enough for the prosecution to show that a transaction failed; it must establish, beyond reasonable doubt, that our client never intended to perform and used the representation purely as a device to extract money. A failed commercial deal, however disappointing for the other party, is not in itself a crime.

With that distinction as our compass, we conducted a line-by-line review of every document our client had retained relating to the transaction. This uncovered evidence the original defence team had not fully explored: purchase orders our client had placed with an overseas supplier shortly after receiving the part-payment, correspondence with a freight forwarder regarding shipping schedules, and a follow-up email — sent by our client, not the complainant — proposing a revised delivery timeline after the supplier experienced a documented production delay.

We then turned to the four witness statements and the documentary exhibits the prosecution intended to rely on, and prepared a detailed cross-examination plan built around three lines of attack:

• The complainant’s own conduct. Bank records showed the complainant had accepted a partial refund from our client after the dispute arose, and continued to place orders with our client’s company for several months afterward — conduct strongly inconsistent with someone who genuinely believed they had been defrauded.
• Gaps in the documentary chain. The certified true copy of the bank statement tendered by the prosecution’s bank witness did not match the statement referenced in the EFCC investigator’s own report — a discrepancy the investigator could not explain when pressed on the source and date of certification.
• The absence of any forensic accounting. Despite the size of the sum involved, the EFCC had not commissioned a forensic audit of either party’s accounts — meaning the prosecution’s case rested entirely on the complainant’s narrative rather than independent financial analysis.

Over the course of cross-examination, each of these points was put to the relevant witness and conceded, one by one, on the record. By the time the prosecution closed its case, the evidentiary picture looked very different from the one presented in the original petition. At that stage, rather than opening our client’s defence, we made the strategic decision to file a no-case submission under Section 239 of the Lagos State Administration of Criminal Justice Law — arguing that the evidence led by the prosecution, even taken at its highest, could not sustain a conviction on either count.