The Nigerian lower house is
full of shady characters as espoused by a recent revelation by the Supreme
Court of Georgia in the US.
Saharareporters found out
that On February 26 2007 the highest court in the state of Georgia ordered that
Femi Gbaja with state bar number 288330 be suspended from the practice of law
for 36 months.
The punishment for Femi
Gbaja’s offence would have been outright debarment, however he played dead
before a full panel of the Supreme
Court of Georgia led by
Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears,before the court could rule on the petition from
his client, he filed a petition for Voluntary Discipline, filed under bar rule
4-227(b) in which he fully admitted to stealing $25,000 from his client.
Femi Gbaja as he was known
in the case file accepted payment of $25,000 as a personal injury claims and
deposited those funds in his attorney trust account in January 2003. He failed
to disburse the funds to his client; instead he withdrew the funds, closed his
practice and left for Nigeria where he ran for elections to represent Surulere
I Federal Constituency in
the Federal House of
Representative under the banner of Alliance for
Democracy (AD) in 2003. Upon
arrival in Nigeria, curiously, Mr. Femi Gbaja
added another name to avoid
detection, he is known in Nigeria with a
compound name “Femi
Gbaja-Biamila”.
A cursory look at his bio on
the website of the National Assembly
(www.nassnig.org) also
betrays his crooked intention to avoid detection, while he gave his
undergraduate degree college as the University of Lagos; his US education was
shrouded in mystery as he claimed to have attended John Marshall Law School,
USA. True, Mr. Femi Gbaja is a graduate of John Marshall Law School in Atlanta,
Georgia and was admitted
to the Georgia State Bar in
June 2001 but in the United States alone there are two of such law schools, one
in Chicago and another one in Atlanta, Georgia where Femi Gbaja graduated.
In the Georgia Attorney
Directory, Femi Gbaja gave his address as 20, Mercy Eneli Street Surulere,
Lagos. He is said to have refunded the clients money ($25,000) in 2006 and his
lawyers have already submitted a certification of compliance of the Supreme Court
ruling as of March 2007.
Making him ineligible to
practice law in the State of Georgia until February 2010.
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