Nigeria's top judge handling
corruption cases against public officials has himself been charged with
bribery, court papers showed Saturday. Danladi Umar was accused by the
country's anti-graft body EFCC of demanding 10 million naira (22,300 euros;
$27,800) from a suspect "for a favour to be afterwards shown to him in
relation to the pending charge", according to court papers seen by AFP.
The embattled judge was also alleged
to have received in 2012, through his personal assistant, the sum of 1.8
million naira from the same accused "in connection with the pending case
before him", the papers revealed. Umar, who chairs the Code of Conduct
tribunal, last year cleared Senate president Bukola Saraki of corruption
charges linked to his time as a state governor.
Doubts about Umar's integrity grew
further when the Senate president was cleared in June 2017 of the charges
against him. The EFCC appealed the ruling and in December, a panel of judges
ordered a retrial of three of the 18 charges initially brought against Saraki,
Nigeria's third-ranking politician after the president and vice-president. The
case has been one of the most high-profile prosecutions since President
Muhammadu Buhari came to power in 2015, vowing to end graft and impunity at a highest level.
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