APEAL COURT decides Baba Suwe’s N25m case today

   

Babatunde Omidina, aka Baba Suwe

The Court of Appeal, Lagos, will today (Friday) deliver judgment in the the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency’s appeal against the judgment awarding N25m as compensation in favour of Yoruba actor, Babatunde Omidina (aka Baba Suwe).

A Lagos High Court in Ikeja, whose judgment is being challenged by NDLEA, had ordered the agency to pay the money to Omidina for wrongfully detaining him on the suspicion of drug ingestion in 2011.

The Justice Chima Nweze-led appeal panel had on April 18, 2013, reserved the case for judgment after parties adopted their briefs of argument.

The court communicated the date for judgment to the lawyers representing the two parties on Thursday.

Both the counsel representing NDLEA, Mr. Femi Oloruntoba, and Omidina’s lawyer, Mr. Bamidele Aturu, separately on Thursday confirmed to our correspondent that they had been served with the hearing notice for the judgment.

Aturu had, at the hearing of the case, urged the appeal court to dismiss the entire appeal.

But  Oloruntoba, in adopting the agency’s five-ground appeal, asked the appeal panel, to set aside the lower court’s judgment for being arbitrary.

Oloruntoba said, “The judgment of the lower court was not a product of the evidence both parties filed before the court.

Aturu faulted all the grounds of the anti-narcotic agency’s appeal, insisting that all the exhibits they relied on at the lower court were “legally worthless”.

Aturu urged the appeal panel to disregard the exhibits, saying they were public documents which ought to be certified but were not.

The trial judge, Justice Yetunde Idowu, had awarded the N25m compensation in favour of Omidina, for being kept in custody by NDLEA beyond the legal time limit on a suspicion of drug ingestion.

The court had also ordered the agency to apologise to the actor in conspicuous pages of two national dailies.

Omidina was arrested by operatives of the NDLEA at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport on October 12, 2011 on allegations of ingestion of narcotics.