In a statement made available to media houses in Lagos, the quartet, in a document titled: A litany of lies, debunked several allegations leveled against them by Ibrahim. The publisher’s allegations were widely published in newspapers with the headline: Stop the Crocodile Tears Part I.
According to the four aggrieved persons, the fact that Jimoh would go around and be publishing the amount of money paid to them as gratuities when they retired from Newswatch publication in May 2011 is mischievous.
“It is pathetic statement of self-indictment, a statement by a man in search of self-validation. In that statement he dealt basically with three issues namely, our retirement from Newswatch and the monies paid to us as retirement benefits, our shareholding and Dele Giwa’s idea.
“Barrister Ibrahim also published the monies paid to each to each of us as retirement benefits. What purpose is that supposed to serve? Is he trying to say that it is because he paid us retirement benefits in May last year that is he is owning the staff four months’ salary in August 2012? The fact of the matter is that the figures submitted to him as retirement benefits were approved in 2002 by the board under the chairmanship of Chief Alex Akinyele when we were contemplating retirement,” the statement read.
The quartet said they never denied they actually retired from their offices in Newswatch Communications Limited, but not from the board of the company whose board meetings they claimed to have attended thrice since Ibrahim took over. They argued that it was, however, amusing that Ibrahim would go to the extent of publishing those retirement letters on the pages of newspapers.
The aggrieved board members also picked holes in the shareholding figures being bandied about by Ibrahim. In their argument, they claimed that even though Ibrahim had bought 51 percent stakes in the news publication, yet he has defaulted in meeting the obligations as stipulated in the purchase of agreement document.
“The question is: has the company or Mr Ibrahim (what’s the difference?) met these obligations? Here are the facts: Mr Ibrahim transferred N510 million on May 9, 2011 from Nicon Investment Limited into an account he opened at Afribank (Mainstreet bank) in the name of Newswatch Communications Limited. He is signatory to that account. As you can see Mr Ibrahim transferred money from himself to himself. If this is not abracadabra we wonder what it is,” the statement read.
The statement also chided Ibrahim for invoking the memory of the Late Dele Giwa in his sponsored write up. According to the senior journalists, the action smarked of “self-aggrandizement” and “fraudulent”.
“Did he attend the marathon ideas sessions that Dele Giwa, Ray Ekpu, Yakubu Muhammed and Dan Agbese have before founding Newswatch or did Dele Giwa tell him privately in his teenage years what publishing ideas he had?… To say that Newswatch has made no significant achievement since Dele Giwa’s death is the most asinine piece of nonsense we’ve heard in a long time,” the statement read.
