A motion on notice has been filed at the Court of Appeal sitting in Abuja seeking to disqualify Mohammed Ndarani Mohammed, SAN, and every other counsel in his firm from representing the Government of Benue State in an appeal arising from a judgment of about 7.4 billion naira, on the ground that he is presently counsel to one of the respondents in the same subject matter.
The application is brought in Appeal No. CA/ABJ/CV/1713/2025, which arises from Suit No. FCT/HC/CV/3693/2025. The appellants are the Government of Benue State and the Attorney-General of Benue State.
The respondents are Bizplus Consulting Services Limited and Mauritz Walton Limited, together with twenty banks joined as garnishees, namely Access Bank, Eco Bank, Fidelity Bank, First Bank, First City Monument Bank, Globus Bank, Guaranty Trust Bank, Keystone Bank, Polaris Bank, Providus Bank, Signature Bank, Stanbic IBTC, Standard Chartered Bank, Sterling Bank, Titan Trust Bank, Union Bank, United Bank for Africa, Unity Bank, Wema Bank and Zenith Bank, and, as the twenty-third and twenty-fourth respondents, the Honourable Minister of Finance and the Accountant-General of the Federation.
The motion is expressed to be brought pursuant to section 36(1) of the 1999 Constitution; Order 6 Rule 1(a) and Rule 10 and Order 8 Rules 1, 2 and 3 of the Court of Appeal Rules 2021; Rule 17(4) of the Rules of Professional Conduct for Legal Practitioners; and under the inherent jurisdiction of the court.
It is dated 15 December 2025 and signed by Mr. Ndubuisi Oko Ukpai, Mr. Johnmary Chukwukasi Jideobi and Mr. Chimezie C. Enuka of Lord Brougham Chambers, 68 Lome Street, Wuse Zone 7, Abuja, as counsel to the respondents and applicants. It is endorsed for service on the appellants through their counsel at Ndarani (SAN) & Co, Solace Chambers, Tunis Street, Wuse, Abuja.
The Nine Reliefs
The application seeks an order disqualifying and restraining the senior advocate, or any other counsel in the employ of his firm, from representing the appellants in the matter.
It seeks a declaration that his conduct in initiating the appeal and all ancillary applications constitutes a conflict of interest and professional misconduct.
It seeks an order setting aside the entire processes filed by the firm, whether signed personally by him or by any other counsel in the firm, for conflict of interest contrary to Rule 17 of the Rules of Professional Conduct.
It seeks an order striking out the notice of appeal and the entire appeal as incompetent, on the ground that counsel who initiated it was incompetent to do so in view of Rule 17(4), which it says prohibits counsel from instituting an action where there is a conflict of interest.
It seeks an order setting aside the records and proceedings of the court of Monday, 8 December 2025, including the rulings delivered, for resting on the incompetent processes filed by the firm and argued by the senior advocate.
It seeks two further orders setting aside the proceedings and rulings of that date, delivered in the absence of the respondents, on the grounds respectively of want of jurisdiction and of breach of the right to fair hearing guaranteed by section 36(1) of the Constitution.
It seeks an order directing the Chief Registrar of the court to forward a certified true copy of the court’s ruling on the application to the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee and the Legal Practitioners Privileges Committee of the Body of Benchers, as a complaint by the court of professional misconduct against the appellants’ counsel.
It concludes with a prayer for any other order the court may deem fit.
The Background: The First Line Charge
The grounds open with an account of the transactions from which the underlying claim arises.
They state that the Federal Government and the governments of the 36 states, including the first appellant, have from time to time obtained loans from entities outside Nigeria, and that those transactions are the foundation of the external or foreign debts whose creditors fall broadly into the categories known as the Paris Club and the London Club.
They state that deductions under the “first line charge” for the period from July 1995 to March 2002 were excluded from the reconciliation exercises, the Federation Account Allocation Committee not having considered how deductions under that head were actually applied to service the external debts of the state governments.
That, they say, produced opacity in a critical matter, with the potential for and the actual occurrence of substantial over-invoicing and excess debits, and consequent injustice to the states, which the state governments did not fully appreciate at the time.
There was accordingly a need for the assistance of experts versed in financial and accounting matters, and the first appellant, alongside the governments of other states, appointed the second respondent and other financial and accounting experts as consultants for the purpose of forensic analysis and reconciliation of the deductions and the recovery of the excess debits made against it by the Federal Government.
The Retainers Relied Upon
The applicants state that it was upon that appointment that the second respondent engaged the senior advocate as its counsel to institute actions against states which had received their Paris Club refunds but had refused to pay the agreed consultancy fees, and that it held several strategy meetings with him on how to recover those fees.
They set out the instructions in detail.
By a joint letter of instruction dated 10 February 2022, the second respondent, jointly with Andrew Bishopton Limited, appointed him in respect of the recovery of consultancy fees from the Ebonyi and Delta State Governments, that letter being exhibited as Exhibit WALT 1.
On 23 February 2022 he instituted an action for Andrew Bishopton Limited and Mauritz Walton Nigeria Limited against the Government of Delta State at the Federal High Court, Port Harcourt Judicial Division, in Suit No. FHC/PH/CS/34/2022, which resulted in judgment on 15 July 2022. A garnishee order absolute was entered against the Delta State Government on 2 November 2022 in that suit, in proceedings at which he appeared for Mauritz Walton, the certified true copy being exhibited as Exhibit WALT 2.
He likewise instituted an action against the Government of Ebonyi State at the same court in Suit No. FHC/PH/CS/35/2022, which resulted in judgment on 15 July 2022, with a garnishee order absolute entered on 2 November 2022 in proceedings at which he appeared for both Mauritz Walton and Andrew Bishopton Limited, exhibited as Exhibit WALT 3.
By two further joint letters of instruction dated 22 November 2022 he was appointed in respect of the appeals arising from each of those judgments, and filed appellate processes on behalf of the second respondent at the Port Harcourt Division of the Court of Appeal in Appeal No. CA/PH/322/2022.
Upon the dismissal of that appeal on 20 January 2023, the applicants state, he filed a notice of appeal at the Supreme Court on 18 April 2023 on behalf of Mauritz Walton Nigeria Limited, which remains pending.
They add that the company had also engaged him to recover its consultancy fees from the Government of Cross River State at the Federal High Court in Suit No. FHC/ABJ/CS/43/18, and that for those engagements it has paid legal fees running into hundreds of millions of naira, as shown in a statement of account exhibited with the application.
“The Fountain And Foundation”
On that footing, the applicants contend that the senior advocate “remains an active Counsel to Mauritz Walton Nigeria Limited for the recovery of consultancy fees arising from the refund of Paris Club to states of the Federation,” which they describe as “the fountain and foundation” of the case before the lower court from which the present appeal emanated.
They state that he is in possession of confidential and privileged information relating to the second respondent concerning the recovery of its consultancy fees from different state governments, in respect of which it had long taken him into its absolute confidence.
“By representing the Appellants/Respondents in this appeal,” the grounds state, he “is a conflicted person and represents an interest against the interest of his current client,” and engages “in a serious ethical violation known as a concurrent conflict of interest which amounts, too, to an infamous conduct unbecoming of a legal practitioner and a bearer of the much coveted prestigious rank of a Senior Advocate of Nigeria.”
They state that the second respondent did not at any time give any consent or waiver of any kind to him to represent the appellants.
The Rule Relied Upon
The application sets out Rule 17(4) of the Rules of Professional Conduct in full:
“A lawyer shall not accept a proffered employment if the exercise of his independent professional judgment on behalf of a client will be or is likely to be adversely affected by the acceptance of the proffered employment, or if it is likely to involve him in representing differing interests, unless it is obvious that the lawyer can adequately represent the interest of each, and each consents to the representation after full disclosure of the possible effect of such representing on the exercise of his independent professional judgment on behalf of each.”
It also sets out section 36(1) of the Constitution, and contends that allowing the appeal to proceed on the foundation of processes filed by a conflicted person “pollutes the entire hearing” conducted on 8 December 2025 and deprives the second respondent of its right to fair hearing, entitling it “as a debt in justice” to have those proceedings and the rulings entered set aside.
The applicants contend further that the court lacks jurisdiction to conduct proceedings or reach decisions in violation of section 36(1) and of its own Rules, that the proceedings and rulings of that date are a nullity, and that the court has the plenitude of powers to set aside its own void decisions.
They also contend, relying on Zenith Bank Plc v John & Ors (2015) LPELR-24315 (SC), that the court lacks the jurisdictional competence to stay the execution of a garnishee order absolute, which is an already executed judgment of the lower court.
The Affidavit
The application is supported by a 25-paragraph affidavit deposed to by Dr. Maurice Ibe, described as an officer of the first respondent, of No. 5, Vistula Close, Maitama, Abuja.
He deposes that the suit before the lower court was brought under the undefended list procedure, that all originating processes and hearing notices were duly served on the appellants, and that despite that service they neither entered appearance nor filed a notice of intention to defend, whereupon the trial court entered judgment in favour of the respondents.
He deposes that the judgment sought to be stayed was delivered by the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory on 17 November 2025 under the undefended list procedure, and that the lower court, having struck out the appellants’ motion to set aside that judgment as incompetent, proceeded to make the order nisi of 18 November 2025 absolute on 4 December 2025.
He states that the judgment sum of 7,448,113,025 naira and 42 kobo “has already been attached by the Order absolute made against the 17th Garnishee, United Bank for Africa Plc.”
The Written Address
In the written address in support, counsel formulate the issue as whether, in the revealed circumstances, the court has the power to restrain and disqualify the senior advocate and every other legal practitioner in his firm from representing the appellants on the ground of conflict of interest.
They submit that a client is entitled to a lawyer’s “wholehearted and zealous representation,” and that representing an opposing party in the same or a different, even unrelated, matter makes it nearly impossible to fulfil that duty to both clients at once, because the lawyer’s judgment may be materially limited by his responsibilities to the other client. Conflicts, they say, can arise from direct adversity, where a lawyer acts against a current client in any matter without informed consent, or from material limitation, where representation is significantly restricted by responsibilities to another client, a former client, a third party or the lawyer’s own interests.
They submit that a lawyer has an ethical obligation to protect a client’s confidential information, and that when he acts against a current client there is a significant risk that information obtained during the earlier representation could be used to that client’s disadvantage.
The Authorities
The address relies principally on Anatogu & Ors v Igwe Iweka II (1995) 9 SCNJ 1, in which the Supreme Court considered Rule 10 of the Rules of Professional Conduct of 1967 as amended in 1979, worded identically to the present Rule 17(4), and held:
“On the one hand, the Courts are not to prevent litigants from employing the services of counsel of their own choice; on the other hand, a person must not be allowed to employ the services of counsel, nor should counsel accept a brief, where it is clear that the services to be rendered flow out of or are closely connected with the previous services he had rendered to the opposing side.”
The court there cited Little v Kingswood Collieries Co (1882) 20 Ch.D 733, and held that the jurisdiction to restrain counsel from acting for the antagonist of his former client stems from the principle that a man ought to be restrained from doing an act contrary to the duty he owes to another, the jurisdiction being exercised at the instance of the former client, a principle the applicants also draw from Onigbongbo Community v Minister of Lagos Affairs & Ors (1971) LPELR-2683 (SC).
They cite Njoku & Ors v Onwunelega (2017) LPELR-43384 (CA), per Oredola, JCA, that the Rules provide against the exertion of adverse influences and conflicts of interest, so that a lawyer represents conflicting interests where, in respect of the client for whom he presently contends, that client’s interest touches or concerns the confidences of another client to whom the lawyer at the same time owes a duty of service or fidelity.
They cite Agamore Energy Ltd v Essar Exploration & Production Ltd & Ors (2021) LPELR-54843 (CA), that Rule 17(4) provides that where a lawyer is involved in representing differing interests, that is to say interests that adversely affect either the judgment or the loyalty of a lawyer to a client, whether conflicting, inconsistent, diverse or otherwise, he shall not be involved in representing such interests.
They cite Ajudua v FRN (2017) 5 NWLR (Pt. 1559) 197 for the inherent jurisdiction of courts to control proceedings before them, including the power to restrain counsel whose continued participation threatens the fairness of the process; Ogun v Akinyelu (2019) 6 NWLR (Pt. 1674) 45, that any procedure or conduct giving one party undue advantage over the other is inimical to the constitutional guarantee of fair hearing; and NBA v Akintokun (2014) 13 NWLR (Pt. 1423) 1, that professional misconduct founded on conflict of interest strikes at the heart of justice and must be checked once brought to the attention of the court.
The list of authorities also includes Ukachukwu v PDP (2014) 17 NWLR (Pt. 1435) 134, Okocha v PDP (2014) 17 NWLR (Pt. 1435) 213 and Deduwa v Okorodudu (1976) 9-10 SC 329.
Motion To Disqualify Benue V Bizplus Court Of Appeal
The allegations in the application are those of the applicants and have not been determined. The senior advocate named has not been heard on them, no court has made any finding against him, and the motion is pending before the Court of Appeal.
... “He Remains Counsel To Mauritz Walton Yet Represents An Adverse Interest” — Court Of Appeal Asked To Restrain Ndarani, SAN, Over Alleged Concurrent Conflict ... TheNigeriaLawyer.