CAC pastor jailed for nine years by London court for stealing £4.1m from academy

NIGERIAN pastor Samuel Kayode has been jailed for nine years after a London high court found him guilty of  spending £4.1m fleeced from the Haberdashers’ Aske‘s chain of academies and using it to fund a flamboyant lifestyle.

 

Pastor Kayode, 58, is an accountant and a part-time pastor of the Christ Apostolic Church in south London. He obtained the money from the academy where he worked and diverted it to personal use, living an extravagant lifestyle, buying himself a chain of classy and choice properties.

 

He has been found guilty by the Woolwich Court and sentenced to prison after it emerged that did not honour a court order last year to refund the money. It is feared that most of the cash has been transferred to Nigeria, while the rest was spent on his late wife, Grace, a second wife, Olubunmi Halima, 33 and two other female partners, whose names given as Toyin Lawal, 50, and Yetunde Turtak.

 

Pastor Kayode, who earns £57,000 a year, was found guilty of obtaining £150,000 by theft and £3.95m by fraud. Apparently, he constantly looted the school account for seven years until he was apprehended in 2012, after a cleaner came across his paper work and made an anonymous call to the chief financial officer.

 

He claimed to have moved the money to Nigeria where he has a £1m empire with Halima but the trust could not recover any asset from Nigeria. So far, the trust was only able to recover only £800,000 from the total money he stole.

 

Apart from spending money on his real wife Grace’s private health care until her death in 2013, Pastor Kayode also signed documents showing he was making investments with Halima and renting flats in Kent for partners, Toyin and Yetunde. During trial, Pastor Kayode tried to blame the theft on his late wife Grace and an office junior, saying that they conspired to smear him by transferring the money to his joint account in revenge for his adultery.

 

He denied having affairs with the other women but admitted that he lied about marrying Halima. However, Toyin also denied they were lovers, saying that as her pastor, he paid for her rent for one month when she was short of cash.