The Court of Appeal in Abuja has reduced the jail term of former lawmaker Farouk Lawan from seven years to five for receiving $500,000 bribe during a legislative probe into the fuel subsidy regime in 2012.
Lawan had approached the court to quash his conviction by a High Court of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) in June 2021.
However, ruling on Thursday, the appellate court discharged and acquitted the former lawmaker on two of the offences he was earlier jailed for.
The court affirmed his conviction on the only remaining offence which the lower court punished with five years jail term.
Dismissing the first two counts, a three-member panel led by the court’s president, Justice Monica Dongban-Mensem, ruled that the prosecution failed to prove that Lawan demanded and agreed to accept $300 million from billionaire oil mogul, Femi Otedola, to exonerate the businessman’s company from the list of firms indicted for fuel subsidy fraud in 2012.
But the Court of Appeal’s panel affirmed the decision of the lower court that Lawan, indeed, accepted $500,000 bribe from Otedola.
After more than nine years of trial, Judge Angela Otaluka of the High Court of the FCT had convicted the former lawmaker on all the three counts preferred against him by the prosecution.
The judge sentenced Lawan to seven years imprisonment on each of the first two counts and to five years in the third count. She ruled that the sentences should run concurrently, implying that the convict was to spend seven years in jail.
