Naijaonpoint
A widow in Abuja has carried her fight to the highest office in the land. Grace Wesley, whose husband Edirin Jerry Wesley is dead, has joined his family in a petition now before President Bola Tinubu, and the petition is aimed at one of the most powerful women in Nigeria’s financial system, Emem Nnana Usoro, the Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria in charge of operations. The petition alleges that Usoro has refused to return the late businessman’s personal effects, his vehicles, his passports and his landed properties to the family he left behind, and it alleges that the most valuable of those properties, five hectares of land at Kagini in Abuja, now sits inside a corporate arrangement the family says was constructed to keep it permanently beyond their reach.
The petition does not describe a disagreement over one asset. It describes a widow shut out of her own husband’s estate, item by item, while the woman the family accuses sits at the summit of the nation’s banking regulation. The petitioners have taken their allegations to the President because, on their account, every other door has remained closed to them.
The safe, the cars and the passports the family says it cannot recover
The petition lists, one after the other, the assets it alleges Usoro has refused to return to the Wesley family. The list begins with the late man’s personal safe. It continues with an Autobiography Range Rover, a Hilux jeep and Toyota Corolla cars. It covers his gym equipment, his office equipment and furniture, and substantial household items. It extends to his two British passports and his Nigerian passports. Beyond the personal effects and the vehicles, the petition alleges that several landed properties across the country, worth billions of naira, are also being withheld from the family.
Each item on that list carries its own weight in the family’s account. A safe is where a man keeps the documents and valuables of his life. Passports are the papers of identity a family needs when it sets out to administer an estate, prove entitlements and deal with institutions at home and abroad. Vehicles, office equipment and household items are the visible substance of a home and a business built over years. The petition alleges that all of it remains out of the family’s hands, held, on the family’s account, by a serving Deputy Governor of the Central Bank.
Five hectares at Kagini and the paper trail the family says replaced them
Among all the assets named, the petition singles out one property for its fullest attention, a five-hectare property in the Kagini area of Abuja. The petition says Grace Wesley and her late husband visited the land together on several occasions while he lived, and that the couple personally fenced the land. On the family’s account, this was their property in the most direct sense, land they walked together, land they enclosed together, land whose history the widow knows at first hand.
The petition alleges that the official record tells a different story today. According to the petition, records of the Abuja Geographic Information Systems now reflect an irrevocable Power of Attorney between a company called Bytrax Technologies Limited, named in the document as Donor, and another company, Metrotel Global Resources Limited, named as Donee. Metrotel Global Resources Limited carries the registration number RC 881850, and the petition alleges that the company is owned by Emem Usoro and her sister, Itoro Usoro. The petitioners describe themselves as “deeply worried” that official land records no longer reflect what they call the “hard truths” of the property’s history.
The family’s allegation, stated plainly, is that land a husband and wife fenced together has passed on paper into the hands of a company the petition alleges belongs to the Deputy Governor and her sister, through an instrument the petition describes as irrevocable. A power of attorney is, in law, an authority given to act on another person’s behalf; it is not, of itself, a transfer of ownership. The petitioners’ position is that the presence of such an instrument over the Kagini land, in favour of a company they allege Usoro owns with her sister, is precisely what now stands between the widow and the property, and it is that position they have placed before the President.
The sister the petition places at the centre of the businesses
The petition does not confine its allegations to the Kagini land or to the items it lists. It alleges a pattern running across the late man’s affairs. The petition states that Usoro uses her sister, Itoro Nnana Usoro, to run most of the businesses Wesley left behind. On the petition’s account, the sister is not a bystander to the dispute but the person through whom the deceased’s business interests are being managed, while his widow and his family remain outside, petitioning for access to what he built.
Taken together, the petition alleges, the structure is complete. The personal effects are withheld. The vehicles are withheld. The passports are withheld. The landed properties are withheld. The most valuable property stands behind a corporate instrument in the name of a company the petition alleges the two sisters own, and the businesses are run, on the petition’s account, by the sister. It is against that whole arrangement, and not against any single item within it, that the family has petitioned the President.
A dispute that began in a courtroom
The confrontation between Grace Wesley and Emem Usoro did not begin with this petition. Court filings from 2019 show that Grace Wesley instituted matrimonial proceedings against her husband at the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory, in Suit No: FCT/HC/PET/251/2019, and that Usoro was named as co-respondent in allegations of adultery and desertion made in those proceedings. Those were allegations in court filings, made while Wesley was still alive and while Usoro was an executive director of the United Bank for Africa, before her appointment as a Deputy Governor of the Central Bank. The petition now before the President is the later chapter of the same dispute, carried from a marriage that ended in litigation to an estate the widow alleges she cannot enter.
What the petition asks of the President
Under the administration of estates laws, a widow and the family of a deceased man are interested parties in his estate, entitled to have his assets identified, gathered and administered for those the law recognises. The petitioners’ position is that this ordinary course has been blocked to them at every point, and that the block carries the authority of high office behind it. Their petition therefore asks President Tinubu to intervene in the matter of the late Edirin Jerry Wesley’s estate.
Source: …Secretsreporters