A Nigerian judge has criticized a lawyer facing criminal charges after he turned up to court in Lagos with a defence team of more than 90 people.<\/p>\n
Justice Aishat Opesanwo described the approach as tantamount to “harassment and intimidation”, a statement by Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency says.<\/p>\n
Prominent lawyer Rickey Tarfa is charged with the obstruction of justice and attempting to pervert the course of justice.<\/p>\n
He denies both sets of charges.<\/p>\n
Mr. Tarfa is accused of blocking the arrest of two suspects wanted in a corruption case by keeping them in his car for nearly six hours on 5th February when they were due to be picked up by the authorities, according to a statement from the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), which brought the case.<\/p>\n
In the second charge, he is accused of perverting the course of justice by communicating through his personal mobile phone with a judge overseeing a trial between the EFCC and two private companies which he was representing.<\/p>\n
Mr Tarfa was granted bail at the hearing and the case has been adjourned until March.
\n–
\nBy: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Nigerian judge has criticized a lawyer facing criminal charges after he turned up to court in Lagos with a defence team of more than 90 people. Justice Aishat Opesanwo described the approach as tantamount to “harassment and intimidation”, a statement by Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency says. Prominent lawyer Rickey Tarfa is charged with the obstruction […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[107,117,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-190789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international","category-odd","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=190789"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190789\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=190789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=190789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=190789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}