Written by Peter Imade-Babs, New York, Oladimeji
Lawa
THREE years after some members of his church reported him to
authorities for an alleged involvement in a failed “wonder bank”,
Ukraine-based Nigerian cleric, Sunday Adelaja is still locked in a
battle of wits with the Police in his host country.
The members
of his church who subscribed to the alleged Wonder Bank scheme lost
about N15 billion ($100 million).
Adelaja has been summoned by
the Ukrainian Police for another round of questioning on Tuesday,
Empowered Newswire reported yesterday.
Some members of the church, “The Embassy of the Blessed Kingdom of
God for All Nations, Kiev,” have been in detention since the last two
years over the fraud allegation, also called a Ponzi scheme by which
depositors are paid huge interests upfront while the bank holds onto the
principal for business.
Adelaja pastors Ukraine’s biggest church
and one of Europe’s largest.
He told Empowered Newswire that
the fresh Police invitation may be a prelude to an arrest and detention
and another flank of racial discrimination and religious victimization
in the former Soviet country.
He has been having a see-saw battle
with Ukrainian Police authorities since 2009.
When the story
first broke in 2009, a news medium, modernghana.com reported that the
Ukrainian Interior Ministry accused Adelaja of defrauding citizens of
money, quoting the ministry’s Department for Media Liaison and
International Activity.
The charges were brought under Part 4,
Article 190 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (the embezzlement of funds
in very large amounts via fraud),” it quoted the ministry as saying.
Several
members of the church were reported to have gone to the Ukrainian
authorities to complain that they were unable to recover the money they
invested, which left many of them bankrupt.
Police later
arrested one of King’s Capital leaders, Aleksandr Bandurchenko, on
suspicion of fraud.
Speculation about Adelaja’s involvement with
King’s Capital grew after reports surfaced that he was part of a bank in
Nigeria known as GS Microfinance Bank Limited.
Adelaja,
however, said those accusations are unfounded. He said he had never been
involved with King’s Capital but denied that it is a Ponzi scheme,
which uses later investments to pay dividends to earlier investors.
He
said that King’s Capital was a legitimate business that failed under
the pressure of the global financial crisis. He said because the company
poured most of the investment capital into real estate, which decreased
in value, it had been unable to pay investors.
“When the
economic crisis came, all the real estate is no more selling. The land
is enough to pay back the money owed. ... The problem is ... everything
is stopped in the country—nothing is selling now in Ukraine,’’ he said.
Adelaja
said Interior Affairs Minister Yurii Lutsenko accused the church of
involvement because he wants to undermine the evangelical movement in
Ukraine. With several thousand members across the nation, God’s Embassy
is one of the most influential congregations in Ukraine.
“(Lutsenko)
is in a very bad situation,” Adelaja said. “He’s got to prove now that
(King’s Capital) is a pyramid scheme, but he cannot.”
Adelaja
said he never encouraged his church members to invest in the company and
cautioned them to invest in businesses that offer insurance. “Of course
... if you invest with insurance you get less percentage,” he said.
“What happened was many people said they didn’t need insurance because
the (King’s Capital leaders) were Christians.”
He was reported to
have acknowledged being affiliated with GS Microfinance, but said he
invested his name and influence in the bank, not millions of dollars. He
was quoted to have said that GS Microfinance was formed to give small
loans to poor Nigerians as a way of lifting them out of poverty.
“It’s
not about what you can get, but the vision of the programme is to
elevate and get as many people out of poverty as possible,” Adelaja was
quoted as saying. “That is one of my lifetime passions ... because I
grew up in poverty.”
Although Adelaja has repeatedly denied any
involvement in King’s Capital, which has not officially been deemed a
fraudulent business, Pentecostal and charismatic leaders across Ukraine
are calling on him to repent, saying they heard him encourage church
members to invest in the company on several occasions.
“He was
not a president of this company, but he was the No. 1 spiritual leader,
and he told them what they have to do,” said Bishop M. S.Panochko,
leader of the All-Ukrainian Union of Pentecostal Churches of Evangelical
Faith, which comprises 1,500 churches across the nation.
“He
can do everything to tell them that he is not involved, but all the
leaders have a lot of facts, and we have a lot of video of when he was
pushing people, and he encouraged people to invest in this business.”
Panochko
was one of 10 leaders who met with Adelaja in 2009 to confront him
about his alleged support of King’s Capital and the negative impact some
of his actions have had on the evangelical church in Ukraine.
The
Pentecostal bishops, who together represent more than 2,500
congregations, listed seven items of concern and said Adelaja had a
pattern of making exaggerated statements. They pointed particularly to
his alleged claim that he led the 2004 Orange Revolution and his reports
that God’s Embassy has 100,000 members across the nation.
The
bishops say those and other statements are untrue.
After the
meeting, Adelaja issued a statement saying he did not organize the
Orange Revolution, though his congregation participated in the
demonstrations. He also asked forgiveness for the negative impact the
King’s Capital scandal has had on Ukrainian churches, but he added that
he did not personally have any involvement in the company.
Despite
the statement, Panochko said the bishops would continue waiting for
Adelaja to apologize for allegedly endorsing King’s Capital. If he does
not repent, Panochko said the bishops would issue a statement to
Christians in Ukraine and abroad, and to the Ukrainian government,
denouncing Adelaja and claiming no affiliation with him.
Moscow-based
pastor Rick Renner, founder of the Good News Association of Churches
and Ministries for Russia, Latvia and Ukraine, said Adelaja’s claims are
hurting Christians in the former Soviet Union.
If convicted,
Adelaja may spend up to 12 years in imprisonment, according to Part 4,
Article 190 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.
Confirming the
invitation by Ukraine’s Internal Affairs Ministry, Adelaja told
Empowered Newswire that the case for which he is being summoned is about
the collapse of King’s Capital.
The Nigerian born cleric was
described last year by the New York Times as one of Ukraine’s “best
known public figures”
Another Nigerian young man was recently
charged with attempted murder after he reportedly fought to defend
himself from the assault of 4 Ukrainian attackers.
Dismissing
the allegation as mere political charges that bears no resemblance to
fact, Adelaja said “in Ukraine you don’t have to commit a crime before
you are accused, you only have to be targetted.”
A well-known
Ukrainian lawyer, Andrey Fedur, argues that as far as the law is
concerned Adelaja “cannot be punished, for he does not have anything to
do with this case. The charges are absolutely made up and have no
foundation.”
According to a New York Times report last year,
“Adelaja has built a vast religious organization under the banner of his
church, Embassy of God. He has become one of Ukraine’s best known
public figures,” making him by far a significant leader in the country
whose favour politicians have curried in the past causing them to win
victories to high public positions.
While Adelaja’s political
battle has been on since 2009, the invitation to the state police on
Tuesday is seen as a heightening of the case, after some members of the
church have been detained for over two years.
Besides the Pastor
himself is under constant police surveillance and not allowed to travel
out of the country.
A media commentator and Washington DC
publisher, Dr. Segun Olanipekun writing on the summoning said alongside
Adelaja, five people have been accused in the church and those have been
arrested by the police ahead of the new invitation.
According
to Olanipekun, “the church fears that this invitation and the deliberate
change of the charge to a criminal one are part of the plot to jail the
innocent pastor as he is seen to be a threat to the present
government.”
The King’s Capital was formed by some members of
Adelaja’s church, but amidst the global economic crisis, the investment
company failed and many investors lost a big chunk of money. The
Ukrainian police is said to be insisting on linking Adelaja to the
failure of the company and alleging criminal acts against the company.
In
previous interviews with the police, Adelaja said his questioners were
always asking if he knew the church members who owned the business and
he always answered in the affirmative, explaining that he was the target
of the whole investigation.
It is in the same country of
Ukraine that a Nigerian student Olaolu Sunkanmi Femi has been detained
since last November on charges of attempted murder after he fought to
defend himself against white attackers.
Media reports said last
November “eyewitness accounts say Olaolu and his friend who were hurled
to the ground and racially abused was able to get up and grab hold of a
piece of glass from a broken bottle to use in self-defence.”
Quoting
Nigerian Embassy officials in Ukraine, reports stated that “it was
while he was defending himself that police arrived at the scene and the
Nigerian was subsequently arrested and charged with attempted murder of
five people,” who were the original assailants.
Commenting on
that case, Adelaja said, “tales like that were not uncommon in Ukraine,
saying “they used to kill Africans like that in the past.”
Nigerian
Embassy staff are said to be involved in the students case, while
Adelaja’s travail is also drawing wider international ripples, with many
petition drives online fighting the pastor’s cause. In one of such,
ipetition.com, and entitled: “Racial and Religious Persecution Against
Sunday Adelaja,” the petitioners noted that “this is a textbook case of
xenophobia and discrimination on religious ground.”
That petition
also noted that the heightening of the offensive against Adelaja may
not be unconnected to the forthcoming elections in the country.
According to the petition, the current persecution “is a systemic effort
to discredit, persecute and incriminate Pastor Sunday Adelaja from his
work as the spiritual leader...in order to dissuade votes in favor of
the opposition.”
Adelaja, in a telephone conversation with
Empowered Newswire acknowledged that there were currently political
moves in place trying to negotiate with him.
He said: “They are
trying to solve the problem politically, but we can’t go public as yet
on the terms, they are afraid the people may back the opposition.”
Since
the country’s Orange revolution that spurred it effectively out of
communism, Adelaja and his church have become a very critical force in
the emergent political landscape of Ukraine. In Kiev, the local Mayor
and the city are known to be very friendly with him, while the
country’s Attorney-General Mykola Onischyk has been known to speak up
for him, defending his rights to innocent presumption until proven
guilty.
It is well known in Ukraine that in 2004, members of the
church took an active part in the events of the orange revolution, which
resulted in Adelaja being declared a persona non-grata to Russia by
then President Vladimir Putin, who accused the Nigerian “of being a
voice and a herald of western value systems,” in the old USSR, Communist
state.
Also in 2007, Victor Yushchenko, the former President of
Ukraine reportedly said that Adelaja’s church in Ukraine, “is the
biggest threat to its political dominance that it held over the
country.”
