Amasi Okon her title documents. The defendant who said in her statement
that she sold her land to Lead British International School in a transaction
different from that she had with Amasi Okon, denied knowing the school
and having any transaction with her in her oral testimony before the
Court. Her evidence before this Court that she did not know Dyna Ladejj
Investment Ltd. or British International School is an afterthought and an
attempt to resile from her statement which she made voluntarily and I so
hold. The law is settled that the Court can convict on a retracted
confessional statement as long as it is satisfied of the truth of the
statement. In BATURE VS. THE STATE (1994) 1 NWLR Pt. 320 Pg. 267,
Onu JSC held as follows:
Indeed, as this court held recently in the case of EGHOGHONOME
VS. THE STATE (1993) 7 NWLR (Pt.306) 383, where an extra-judicial
confession has been proved to have been made voluntarily and it is
positive and unequivocal and amounts to an admission of guilt, as in
the instant case, it will suffice to ground a finding of guilt regardless
of the fact that the maker resiled therefrom or retracted it altogether
at the trial, since such a u-turn does not necessarily make the
confession inadmissible.”
The statement of the defendant has been proved to be one that
was voluntarily made and I so hold. The defendant cannot therefore resile
from its contents and I so hold.
The defendant’s oral testimony is that Okon Amasi conducted a
search when he received Appendix B. Her counsel also made heavy
weather of the failure of the prosecution to produce the search report. My
considered view is that failure to produce the search report would not
make Appendix B a genuine document and I so hold. The fact that Okon
Amasi did not discover the fraud in the document does not make it any
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