CFL Group of Companies, a property firm, has threatened to sue the Lagos State Land Registry for N5 billion over an alleged fraudulent land title linked to its property at 24 Adeola Odeku Street, Victoria Island, Lagos.
The group gave the Land Registry a seven-day ultimatum to deregister the disputed Governor’s Consent, alleging that the title was used to challenge its ownership of the property and enable continued construction on the site.
The Group Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of CFL Group, Lai Omotola, made the allegations on Thursday during a press briefing on what the company described as “Land Title Laundry” in Lagos State.
According to the group, it bought the property and began construction before another company allegedly arrived with police officers and sealed the site, claiming ownership based on a Governor’s Consent.
CFL said the disputed title traced the ownership of the property to the late Samuel Ige, who purportedly sold it to the late Alhaji Ganiyu Amusan, father of businessman Tayo Amusan.
The group said it subsequently investigated the ownership history and discovered that Ige died in 2012, while Ganiyu Amusan died in 1994.
It said the discovery raised questions about documents allegedly executed in the names of the two men in 2015, including a transaction purportedly involving Ige and Amusan.
CFL further claimed that its investigation uncovered a 2015 police affidavit purportedly sworn by Ige, stating that his original land certificate had been lost.
The group said the Ige family later confirmed that Ige had died three years before the affidavit was made and that the photograph and signature on the document did not belong to him.
It also claimed that a letter of objection attributed to Ige was received by the Land Registry on September 1, 2015, ahead of the release of the disputed Governor’s Consent.
According to CFL, the Ige family subsequently petitioned the Lagos State Land Registry over the documents, after which the registry invited Tayo Amusan in connection with the proposed deregistration of the Governor’s Consent.
The group claimed that Amusan failed to honour the invitation on two occasions, while the dispute over the property continued.
Omotola said the company would seek N5 billion in damages if the disputed consent was not deregistered within seven days.
“We hereby issue a seven-day ultimatum to the Registrar of Lands to deregister this consent or face legal suit requesting damages of N5 billion because the title which they wrongly issued is what they have used to dispossess us of our land and continue to construct on the land. We have not been the beneficiary of corruption in the system,” he said.
CFL also alleged that the disputed case was an example of a wider practice of land title fraud in Lagos, which it described as “Land Title Laundry.”
Omotola said the practice involved fraudsters allegedly targeting abandoned or undeveloped properties in high-value areas such as Ikoyi and Victoria Island and creating false historical ownership records to establish claims over the properties.
He said the perpetrators sometimes use the names of deceased persons as purported previous owners before producing backdated documents and introducing them into the official land registry.
“They will look for a prominent name that has passed on and put the person as the owner of such land. They then forge land certificates, backdated to the 1970s, where documents are no longer available,” Omotola said.
The group alleged that after such documents are inserted into the registry, the perpetrators obtain a Governor’s Consent, creating the impression that the title has been authenticated by the Lagos State Government.
CFL, however, stressed that a Governor’s Consent is different from a Certificate of Occupancy, explaining that the former is the Governor’s approval of a transaction involving an existing interest in land and does not, by itself, cure defects in the underlying title.