In Victory Park Estate, Lekki, Lagos State, Nigeria, a Receiver Manager for AMCON Mr Lanre Olaoluwa, is using miscreants and touts to harass, intimidate and harm bona-fide landowners and beating any construction worker that dares to come to site. All of this is preparatory to ‘grabbing’ their Land.
Residents of Victory Park Estate, Igbokushu, Eti-Osa Local Government area, Lagos State purchased land legally from Grant Properties/Knight Rook Limited, the only companies authorised to sell plots of land in the Estate. There were no caveats in the Lands Registry or the Corporate Affairs Commission when the residents carried out due diligence checks before purchasing Land from Grant Properties/Knight Rook Ltd.
To develop infrastructure in the Estate, Grant Properties had taken loans from 4 Commercial banks and subsequently ran into problems over repayment. Consequently, the banks took their facilities to AMCON but still retained Grant Properties/Knight Rook Limited as Selling Agents via an MOU. Despite these sales, Grant Properties/Knight Rook was still unable to repay AMCON who then appointed a Receiver Manager, Lanre Olaoluwa to take over Grant’s assets and recover funds to pay down the loan. Olaoluwa proceeded to lock up Grant’s and Knight Rook’s offices and commenced negotiations with the key Sponsors Otunba Jide Awosedo and others.
Negotiations broke down because both parties could not agree. Added to all this drama is a twist wherein the MD of one of the creditor banks went ahead and sold land which was supposedly pledged as collateral to a Director of his bank after the loans had been sold to AMCON – insider trading! Conflict of interest! Fraud!
And also despite the executed and subsisting MOU. Grant Properties then took the matter to court and the Court invalidated the conflicted sale and ruled in favor of Grant Properties. But the Receiver Manager has turned a blind eye to this. As we write, neither the conflicted sold property, housing what is now Cadogan Estate, nor its residents are being disturbed by Lanre Olaoluwa or AMCON.
On 29th September 2017, just a few days after the negotiations broke down, Lanre Olaoluwa served residents in the Estate with a letter, demanding that they submit their title documents for verification. He promised to provide a Survey plan which will show his claim to unencumbered land in the Estate.
Till date he has not produced any such Survey simply because it does not exist! Note also that the authority to verify title documents does not reside in the hands of private individuals or companies but rather with the various Government appointed parastatals and offices and the Law Courts. Residents later found out that Lanre Olaoluwa intended to present any title document submitted to him by residents to AMCON as proof that residents had succumbed to his wily ways and were now desperate to negotiate payment of validation fees which was a complete fallacy.
A video of a scene at the estate after the touts attacked and injured workers who brought materials to site can be found here:
On 30th September 2017, Olaoluwa again sent in miscreants and touts to harass workers on all plots where construction was ongoing. Believe it or not, those miscreants and touts have showed up every single day from then till now. People have taken mortgage loans and all kinds of loans and are still unable to build.
The aggrieved residents have sent a petition to AMCON, have published a petition to the Commissioner of Police on pages 20 and 21 of the Guardian newspaper on 7th November 2017 and also published an open letter to the President on pages 17 of the Guardian newspaper on 9th November 2017.
The harassment must stop! Nigerians are tired of suffering because of lawlessness. The position of the law on this matter is clear. Lanre Olaoluwa cannot be above the law. He needs to stop harassing innocent citizens with touts! Pursue Grant Properties/Knight Rook and leave
Emeh Achanga,the CEO of the Miss Petite Nigeria Brand is a lawyer turned blogger. She is very passionate about writing, with several publications and awards to her credit .She is currently working on publishing a collection of short stories which are basically a memoir about her exciting true experiences.
