It has come to the fore that current Ogun State Governor, Dapo Abiodun was a convicted felon in the USA back in 1986.
According to information released by the City of Miami Police, the then 26-year-old violently resisted a police officer and a Secret Service agent as they tried to execute an outstanding warrant for his arrest.
His arrested was necessitated after Abiodun, now 61 years of age, failed to appear in court for a previously instituted case of credit card fraud, reveals the records seen by Switch Nigeria.
The document revealed that Abiodun, on November 6, 1986, at about 8:20 p.m., resisted being handcuffed by a police officer from the Miami Dade Department and an Agent of the U.S. Secret Service. Both were detailed to produce the then 26-year-old Mr Abiodun in court for being at large over an ongoing criminal case.
Casefile:
The 36-year-old case file was released by the Coalition of Ogun State Students and Youths (COSSY), a political action think-tank sympathetic to Abiodun Akinlade, Mr Abiodun’s challenger in the upcoming APC primaries for the 2023 gubernatorial election in Ogun.
Following initial reports about his criminal past last month, the ruling All Progressives Congress asked Mr Abiodun to address allegations in a petition compiled by COSSY. Whereas the governor, through his lawyers, admitted his arrest in the U.S., he insisted he was never convicted.
Mr Abiodun’s lawyers said the matters ended at investigations, which are not sufficient to disqualify him from getting his party’s ticket for a second term. They also argued that the matter was already status-barred since it occurred more than three decades ago.
The Nigerian Constitution allows a maximum of 10 years for a criminal convict to be excluded from seeking an elective office. Even if Mr Abiodun had been convicted in 1986, 33 years had passed as of 2019 when he was first elected governor.
