Tali Shani vs Tali Shani

Tales from the Bleak House occupied by the Nigerian elite

A few days ago, the details of a most fascinating case involving the great and the good of Nigeria was dug up and posted on twitter by Adam Wren, the Director of Open Justice UK, an organisation that campaigns for transparency in the UK’s legal system.

Below I will first summarise the details of the case as set out in the judgement of the UK Tribunal in the matter of Tali Shani v Chief Mike Agbedor Abu Ozekhome and after that I will add my own comments and opinion.

Lieutenant General Jeremiah “Jerry Boy” Useni (Rtd) and Chief Mike Ozekhome (SAN)

The Details

1. 1993 - A London house (79 Randall Avenue, NW2; title MX117803) was registered on 16 November 1993 to one “Tali Shani.” Pre‑registration papers show the actual contract was a £110,000 sale by one Hanna Witecka to a buyer named “Philips Bincan.” A routine search on the property ran to 17 November 1993 - i.e., the same window when the “Tali Shani” registration went on. No “Tali Shani” paperwork exists for that conveyancing search. Back in 1993, the UK’s HM Land Registry didn’t require today’s modern ID1 process. As such, the judge noted that the property could well have been sold to “Tali Shani” using the signed deed alone i.e. a property could have been sold to an alias. The law is ever evolving so this cannot happen today but it could in 1993.

2. 2001–2004 and 2011–2019 Rent Collections - A property agent’s ledger (headed “213 Quadrangle”) showed that the rents from Randall Avenue were used to fund outgoings for Flat 213, Quadrangle Tower (W2) - this Quadrangle Tower flat was General Jeremiah “Jerry Boy” Useni’s registered London address. Later, London agent Akeem Johnson says he managed Randall Avenue for General Jeremiah Useni (2011–2019); his 2019 s.21 notice even names the landlord as “Jeremiah Useni” at the Quadrangle address. All of this is to say, to all intents and purposes, the Randall Avenue house owned by “Tali Shani” really belonged to Jerry Boy in all but name.

3. 2019–2021 Enter Chief Ozekhome - In 2019, popular Nigerian constitutional lawyer and Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN, Nigeria’s KC equivalent), Chief Mike Ozekhome claims he met a man calling himself Mr. Tali Shani who gives him Power of Attorney (PoA) over the property i.e. implying that this Mr. Tali Shani is the same “Tali Shani” who bought the property in 1993. A second PoA with the same mysterious man in May 2020 oddly claims ₦100m and “legal services.” And then a TR1 transfer - the form to transfer ownership of a property in the UK - is signed on 17 August 2021 to transfer the property from Mr. Tali Shani to Ozekhome. In box 8 of the form it ticked: “not for money or anything that has a monetary value.” i.e. the property was being transferred to Ozekhome free of charge. Ozekhome’s story here is that Mr. Tali Shani was giving him the property to settle the ₦100m PoA and the “legal services” he provided to him. The judge ultimately decided that this “₦100m/legal services/gift” story was an invention by Ozekhome and takes Box 8 at face value - a free gift to Ozekhome.

   Ozekhome was seemingly trying to be clever here by claiming two things at the same time to avoid tax. HMRC charges Stamp Duty Land Tax on “consideration” for a land transfer. A true gift (no money or “money’s worth”) normally isn’t chargeable. But if the transferee assumes debt (e.g., takes over a mortgage) or any other money’s‑worth is given, SDLT can still be chargeable. The judge expressly noted that the parties “presumably intended HMRC to” accept Box 8 for SDLT purposes - i.e., no tax if truly nothing of value was given. But at the same time Ozekhome was trying to claim the property was being given to him for the ₦100m PoA and “legal services” rendered.

4. Sept 2022–Feb 2023 Enter Ms. Tali Shani - This is the part of the story where I start to get a bit confused but I shall try my best. Westfields Solicitors, a London firm, file an objection to the TR1 transfer to Ozekhome on 26 September 2022 on behalf of one “Ms. Tali Shani,” claiming she’s the actual (1993) owner of the house and that she never signed the 2021 transfer. On 27 February 2023 the Land Registry (HMLR) refers the dispute to the First‑tier Tribunal (Property Chamber). Note that under s.73 LRA 2002 almost anyone may object to a property transfer. The Tribunal then decides the underlying merits and can direct the Registrar to register or cancel. I will speculate on my confusion later.

5. 2023 Enter Fake Documents - This part gets even more confusing but please stay with me. Jerry Boy files three statements for Ozekhome (May, October, December 2023). Separately, in August 2023 the Tribunal receives a forged “Useni” statement from a Yahoo address supporting the Applicant (“Ms. Tali Shane”). Jerry Boy robustly and emphatically denies this statement. In a separate court case in 2022 that led to the seizure of £2m from Jerry Boy, he admitted opening accounts under the coined false name “Tim Shani” and using similar coined names (e.g., “Tim Tali Investments”). The judge used that history to make an informed inference about the 1993 “Tali Shani” title.

6. June 2024 Appearance and Disappearance - As the saying goes, if someone explains Nigeria to you and you understand it, the person has done a poor job of explaining. As your confusion intensifies, please understand that this is perfectly normal. Mr. Tali Shani (male, b. 1973) gives evidence about the 1993 purchase. He does not seem to know even the basic details of the purchase and even guessing £200k as the purchase price. He claimed he used Jerry Boy as his conduit to buy the house. In 1993, this Mr. Tali Shani fellow was supposedly 20 years old while Jerry Boy was 50 and one of the most powerful men in Nigeria. As his testimony begins to fall apart, he claimed he paid almost double the £110k shown in the 1993 papers - an answer the judge finds implausible. When asked how he was able to buy a London property at the age of 20, he said he had made money from selling mangoes.

   Jerry Boy then testifies (by video) claiming he bought the house himself in 1993 with his savings and no mortgage, and that Mr. Tali Shani had “nothing” to do with it. This is quite a bombshell revelation. Separately the applicant, Ms. Tali Shani, fails to appear before the Tribunal. One “Dr Osa” types in the hearing chat (they used an online chat system to send messages and share documents) that she (the applicant) is “in surgery” and asks for two weeks for her to be strong enough to appear. Adjournment is granted and shortly after, the Applicant side starts producing “identity” and “medical” paperwork.

7. Late 2024 Collapse of Evidence - The Applicant’s team files an ECOWAS travel card, NIN slip, affidavit of birth, and a 9mobile phone bill for “10 Commercial Road, Jos.” Then, a few days before the hearing was due to resume, they announce she died on 3 October 2024 and produce a death certificate and a Nasarawa court order (images are included in the court document pp. 23–25: ECOWAS card; NIN; “Celebration of Life” flyer; affidavit). The flyer even advertises a “Sunday 30 November 2024” thanksgiving but that date was actually a Saturday.

   The NIMC (represented by Mr Festus Esangbedo) finds that the Applicant’s NIN was created remotely via Monaco in France and bypassed fingerprints by using the “amputee” exception. It also used a non‑ICAO photograph. The NIN was first suspended then removed. The Nigeria Police (represented by Superintendent Ibrahim Sini) reported that the Jos address did not exist and the 9mobile account was actually in the name of the Lagos lawyer, Mohammed Edewor acting for the applicant.

8. 2025 Implosion of Witnesses - An alleged cousin of the applicant (one Mr Obasi) and her son (Mr Damola) give ridiculous and unevidenced stories including the complete lack of any family photos at all, claiming they were not photogenic hence why they never took photos. When asked for photos of the funeral of Ms. Tali Shani, Obasi says the official funeral photographer was killed by a bandit (it is amazing that Nigerians will go so far as to bear false witness against bandits.) The Tribunal rejects all their evidence as fabricated and finds “Ms Tali Shani” never existed; her identity documents (ECOWAS/NIN/affidavit/phone bill/death certificate/obituary) were all manufactured. The Applicant’s case is struck out as an abuse. The Applicant’s UK solicitor is criticised for astonishing complacency in “verifying” a client he never properly met.

9. Ok but Tali Shani? - Even with the Applicant struck out, the Tribunal still sought to decide the underlying merits of the case i.e. whether Mr. Tali Shani actually owned the title he sought to transfer to Ozekhome in 2021. It finds he did not. Jerry Boy’s evidence (“I owned it… it is my property”) plus the Quadrangle rent paper trail and agent evidence outweigh Mr. Tali Shani’s story.

   Given Jerry Boy’s admitted use of coined “Shani/Tali” names (in the Jersey case) and the 1993 file showing “Philips Bincan” as the contract buyer, the judge concludes Bincan was a nominee and the executed transfer was directed into the alias “Tali Shani” within the same window. Again, this was possible in 1993 but not today. And so in the final analysis - if Mr. Tali Shani never owned the property in 1993, he had no title to pass to Ozekhome in 2021 - nemo dat quod non habet (you can’t give what you don’t have). The judge said that even if Ozekhome had paid for the property, he would not have “cured” this nemo dat issue.

10. September 2025 - Both sides ended up losing the case. (i) Applicant struck out as there was no proof she ever existed, and (ii) Ozekhome’s registration refused; the Chief Land Registrar is directed to cancel the 2021 application. The register stays showing “Tali Shani” as the owner for now. No order for costs is given i.e. both sides have wasted their money pursuing this case. The judge states the real 1993 purchaser was Jerry Boy. Rather inconveniently, the General died in January 2025 so it is now for his personal representatives (with an English grant) to regularise/rectify the register. The judgment flags it’s “a matter for other authorities” what, if anything, they do next.

    The register can’t automatically switch to Jerry Boy’s estate even after the judge’s ruling because the Tribunal’s power is discretionary - it can cancel or give effect to applications but it can’t re‑write the register to add people who weren’t parties. Fixing this would be a separate process by Jerry Boy’s estate under the UK’s Land Registration Act.

What was this all about?

This was quite a bizarre and fascinating case that leaves you with more questions than answers. This is where I provide my own speculation and thoughts.

The first question to ask is who instructed the UK firm, Westfield Solicitors, to intervene in this routine transfer from Jerry Boy to Ozekhome? This is perhaps the weirdest part of the story. From the court document we know that Kingsley Efemuai of Westfield told the Tribunal that “we were instructed by the firm of Edewor & Co. in Nigeria,” which he repeatedly called his “instructing solicitors.” This objection by Westfield was lodged on behalf of Ms. Tali Shani who they claimed was the real owner of the property and had never agreed to transfer it to Ozekhome.

On the other side of the argument, it was Ozekhome who called Jerry Boy as a witness and in fact Ozekhome called him a “star witness.” Alas, Jerry Boy completely undermined Ozekhome when he gave evidence saying: “I owned it… I bought the property… it is my property,” and that the man calling himself Mr Tali Shani had “nothing” to do with the 1993 purchase. To repeat: Ozekhome was trying to complete a transfer from Mr. Tali Shani (who he claimed was the owner of the property) to himself and called Jerry Boy as his star witness. This backfired spectacularly on Ozekhome.

So what was going on here? The first thing I tried to find here was any evidence of Jerry Boy going senile in his old age. I found nothing and in fact the judge noted that that while he was physically frail and sometimes struggled with hearing/voice, and had a dialysis scheduled the next day, there was no medical evidence of mental illness, decline or confusion, and the judge was satisfied he understood questions and gave clear, consistent answers.

I also searched the obituary and follow‑up coverage in major Nigerian outlets (The Nation, Punch, The Guardian, Channels, ThisDay, Daily Trust). None reported any pre‑death family dispute over his assets. The stories concentrate mainly on his illness, tributes, and burial (The Nation also notes he died in France and was buried beside his wife and son). What is consistently reported across Nigerian media was that he died after a “prolonged illness.” Given that a “brief illness” is the phrase of choice of the Nigerian media in describing a death they cannot be bothered to investigate, we can safely say Jerry Boy had been ill for a while before his death and it was perhaps well known that he was approaching the end of his life. (Some even used “protracted illness.”)

This suggests an insider attempted to take advantage of Jerry Boy using knowledge of his stolen assets. A key figure in the notoriously corrupt Abacha regime, he would have helped himself to plenty of public funds, likely forgetting just how much (and where) he hid overseas. In fact, his regime directly inspired the term "Politically Exposed Person" (PEP). The complex scheme with aliases like "Tali Tim Shani" was likely his method for laundering and hiding all his loot.

Jerry Boy and Ozekhome

There is enough evidence to suggest that Jerry Boy and Ozekhome had a long relationship. Both of them were delegates at the Abuja National Conference in 2014. While this may be circumstantial, by 2019 Ozekhome was Jerry Boy’s lawyer when he ran for Plateau Governor on the PDP platform (he lost.) Ozekhome handled all his petition cases up to the Supreme Court where he also lost. Earlier this year, in a published tribute to Jerry Boy, Ozekhome described himself as Jerry Boy’s “friend and lawyer.” Finally, the Tribunal judgement itself noted that while Ozekhome first met “Mr Tali Shani” in 2019, he had known Jerry Boy for over 20 years as both his lawyer and friend. It also records that Jerry Boy’s property fixer (Akeem Johnson) personally introduced Ozekhome to “Mr Tali Shani” in 2019, and that “Mr Tali Shani” executed powers of attorney in 2019 and 2020 in Ozekhome’s favour over the Randall Avenue house.

All of this is only what I could find on the internet. For the Tribunal to have placed the relationship at 20 years, they must have seen other evidence to support that claim.

Piecing it all together

We come back to the question of what really happened here to cause a seemingly routine property transfer to blow up in this manner where everyone lost. Again, I must stress that I am only speculating here.

Knowing that Jerry Boy was coming to the end of his life, Ozekhome tried to get an asset off him. It may be that it was for “legal services” rendered when he was representing him during his various election tribunal cases - the bills for those wild goose chases tend to rack up very quickly. Perhaps in their discussions, Jerry Boy mentioned (or maybe Ozekhome checked out his various assets) that he owned a property in Neasden, which is currently worth more than £700,000, with no mortgage on it.

Transferring the property from Jerry Boy to Ozekhome was not going to be straightforward given that the Tali Shani, in whose name Jerry Boy bought it, was a non-existent person. The way Ozekhome then tried to solve this headache was to find an actual living Tali Shani person to pose as the owner of the property who was transferring it to him. This person so happened to be a man who was 20 years old at the time of the property purchase. Credit to Ozekhome for getting this far by finding an actual person to match a name that Jerry Boy made up in the 1990s. I imagine that Tali Shani is a name not unheard of in Plateau state where Jerry Boy comes from.

The situation became further complicated because Ozekhome was not the only one who knew about, or had his eyes on, this property. As Jerry Boy was coming to the end of his life, members of his immediate and extended family were likely positioning themselves for his property. Perhaps a family member considered it an affront that Ozekhome was trying to obtain one of the man’s properties for himself and decided to do whatever was in their power to stop it. If Ozekhome could produce a Mr. Tali Shani, they too could manufacture a Ms. Tali Shani. This led them to fake all sorts of documents for this Ms. Tali Shani in a bid to deceive the court - Nigerians tend to have this amusing belief that the white man is a fool who can be easily deceived. Perhaps for good measure, they used a woman to counter Ozekhome's use of a man, ensuring a clear distinction (the person on the title was merely “Tali Shani” so could have been a he/she or anything else.)

Ozekhome then played into their hands through his incredible sloppiness. Here was a Nigerian Silk who called witnesses to testify on his behalf, only to have them blow his case to pieces. To reiterate, he was the one who called Jerry Boy and Mr. Tali Shani as witnesses. He does not appear to have done even the most basic preparation for them, which is why Jerry Boy went off-piste and disowned Mr. Tali Shani. Under examination by Ms. Tali Shani’s lawyers, Mr. Tali Shani unravelled when he could not provide a convincing story for how he bought a London property at the age of 20—hence the ridiculous story about mangoes and cattle and him not even knowing the price of the property he claimed to own. Again, Ozekhome appears not to have done even the most basic preparatory work. Whatever the underlying merits of Jerry Boy’s case at the election petition tribunal, with Ozekhome as his lawyer, did he ever stand a chance?

I find Ozekhome’s role in all this to be frankly appalling. The fact that he penned a lavish tribute to Jerry Boy after his death - and after Jerry Boy had blown up his case at the Tribunal - gives the impression he was merely trying his luck to get a London property for free. That he was trying to obtain what was surely the proceeds of corruption against the Nigerian state is the icing on a very sordid cake. This is a case of a lawyer, who swore to uphold the law, trying to subvert it in a foreign country where he felt the prying eyes of Nigerians might never see. Mr. Tali Shani’s identity documents do not appear to have been tested by the Tribunal, but who knows what might have been found if they had? For all we know, those documents were also completely fake.

It is fitting that the property remains owned by “Tali Shani” - neither an animal, place, nor thing. The mess is now left for Jerry Boy’s family to clean up, if they are so inclined. There might be a case for the Nigerian government to intervene and claim the property as proceeds of corruption against the state. But would you trust them to do that? There are very few reasons why you should.

This sordid spectacle in a London tribunal serves as a damning testament to the Nigerian elite's utter moral bankruptcy. Stripped of pretense, they are revealed as entities without scruple or shame, willing to debase the nation's dignity for the basest of short-term gains. That a revered Silk and a former General could be implicated in a scheme built on such pathetically transparent falsehoods - lies too pathetic to deceive a child - exposes a staggering cultural rot. It proves that for this class, there is no bottom; there is only the grift. They are not leaders, but mere predators in tailored suits, indistinguishable from common hustlers in their desperate avarice.

A profound and utter disgrace.