The Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) has revealed how it exposed a syndicate of 189 fake companies that were involved in fraudulent land deals in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
The syndicate was allegedly working with some lawyers and staff of the Abuja Geographical Information System (AGIS) to obtain land allocations using non-existent companies.
The Registrar General of the CAC, Hussaini Magaji, made this disclosure at a press briefing on Tuesday in Abuja. He said the CAC was alerted by the Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA) after it received an application for land allocation from a company that was not registered with the CAC.
Magaji said the CAC conducted a thorough investigation and discovered that there were many other fake companies that had been used to secure land allocations in the FCT. He said the CAC also arrested two suspects, including a lawyer, and identified a cartel of AGIS staff, lawyers, and CAC staff who were behind the scam.
He said, “I want to inform the public that one of the major achievements of my tenure is our ability to crack down on a syndicate of individuals that are causing trouble for the CAC. This syndicate creates fake companies with the help of some lawyers who claim to be our accredited agents and some AGIS staff who issue land allocations to them. We only found out about this crime after the FCTA asked us to verify some applications from some entities that were not in our system.”