Justice Abubakar Kutigi of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) High Court, Asokoro, Abuja, on Friday rebuked former Chairman of the defunct Pension Reform Task Team, Abdulrasheed Maina, and his defence counsel over what he described as repeated attempts to stall his ongoing trial.
Maina is being prosecuted by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) alongside Ann Igwe Olachi on a nine-count charge bordering on the alleged receipt of stolen funds amounting to N738,612,019.99.
The defendants were arraigned in 2019.
The proceedings on Friday, scheduled for a trial-within-trial, were again stalled following a request by Maina’s new counsel, Emmanuel Wuyi, who sought a two-week adjournment to enable him study the case, stating that it was his first appearance in the matter.
“My lord, the first defendant has been ill and I understand that this case has a history of adjournments. This is my first time appearing before your lordship, being that I have just been briefed about this case. I am asking your lordship for two weeks to enable me to study the facts of the case and I am even looking at resolving this matter with the prosecution,” Wuyi said.
However, Justice Kutigi expressed dissatisfaction with the repeated delays, noting that the defendant had changed legal representatives multiple times since the commencement of the trial.
“Two weeks for what? Everybody is ready, everybody is tired. We want every party to have a fair hearing and do their cases, but when there is an adjournment, he will go and hire a new lawyer and when we insist we will go on, you will now say you were denied fair hearing. He has changed to another lawyer now and I have lost count of the numbers of lawyers who have appeared in this case. We know the substance and the end will determine it. The integrity of what we do here is critical and important,” the judge said.
Prosecution counsel, Francis Usani, also decried what he described as the defendant’s tactics to frustrate proceedings. He informed the court that prosecution witnesses for the trial-within-trial were present and ready to proceed.
“My lord, only yesterday we were served with an application for a stay of proceedings, application on the jurisdiction of this court, travel application and application for appeal. If he has been able to file such voluminous and bulky applications, it is assumed that the counsel knows the case so that we can start, except he is going to withdraw these applications and take a decision if he wants to continue with the trial-within-trial. I can give him the opportunity to watch the video, invite him to my office and let him watch the video; if he sees anything then he let us know so that we can save the court’s time,” Usani said.
Addressing the defence counsel, Justice Kutigi further queried the rationale behind filing multiple applications while seeking to proceed with the trial.
“How can you say you want to do this case and at the same time you filed applications of jurisdiction, stay of proceedings and so on. What do you really want? You have to decide on what we are coming here to do on the next adjourned date,” he said.
In response, Wuyi made an oral application to withdraw the motion for stay of proceedings and confirmed his readiness to continue with the trial-within-trial at the next sitting.
The court subsequently granted the application to withdraw the stay of proceedings dated February 10, 2026, and adjourned the matter to February 26, 2026, for continuation of the trial-within-trial.
