The Dediare family in Lagos has dragged a firm, Financial Derivatives Company Limited, and its Managing Director, Mr. Bismark Rewane, before a Lagos High Court, seeking an order of the court to stop the company and its MD from further administering control over the estate of its late patriarch and matriarch.
According to a suit numbered ID/3560/GCMW/17, filed by Toritseju Mene Dediare, the last child of the late Engineer Tselogun Dediare and late Mrs. Rosaline Anunu Dediare, funds conservatively estimated at about N100 million left behind by her deceased parents had been mismanaged as they could not be accounted for.
In the suit filed through her lawyer, Mr. Sola Abidakun, the claimant sought a declaration of the court that the financial estate left behind by her late parents belong to the entire children.
Financial Derivatives is a company that engages in the business of management of funds on behalf and on the instruction of its clients.
In a statement of claim, the claimant averred that Rewane had held himself out as a person who was personally interested in the affairs of the estate of her late parents, “by his manifest act of adding one other signatory to the account of my late mother, without obtaining letters of administration from the probate registry.”
Among several other alleged financial infractions, the claimant said that the defendants should be made to account for a sum of N40 million, which her late mother instructed her bankers, Union Homes Savings & Loans Limited, to issue as bank draft in her name in which same was used in opening an investment account with Rewane’s company.
Besides, the claimant is seeking an order of the court to particularly direct the defendants to file on oath, the applicable exchange rates in transacting the sum of 28, 000 pounds (about N19.4m) transferred to her mother’s account in custody of the defendants.
She averred further that by surreptitiously adding another signatory to the investment account of her late mother, the second defendant (Rewane) had aided an unwholesome conduct having allegedly transferred money out of the account, thereby violating the duty of care owed to her departed mother.
As such, the claimant is seeking, among other prayers, a declaration of the court that her late parents’ estate belongs to the entire children and not exclusively to the first and second defendants.