Mr Okoyomon, who was the chief executive of the NSMPC until November 2013, is wanted in the UK by the authorities seeking to try him over a N750m (£2.8m) bribery scandal. In September 2014, he was arrested over a polymer note bribery case, in which he faces charges of running an international network diverting bribery sums into slush accounts in the UK and Canada.
After further investigation into the scam by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) in collaboration with the Australian Federal Police and the British National Crime Agency (BNCA) , it was decided to accept a British request to have Mr Okoyomon extradited. He holds dual Nigerian and British citizenship, so can be tried as a British citizen in the UK and the Nigerian has approved the request to hand him over.
Since his arrest, Mr Okoyomon has been fighting extradition but in May last year, a federal high court in Abuja ordered that he can be extradited to the UK to face criminal charges. He appealed that decision bit the Federal the Court of Appeal in Abuja has dismissed his case, meaning that he now only has one more reprieve before the Supreme Court.
A three-man panel of the Court of Appeal, in a unanimous judgment, dismissed the appeal filed on behalf of Mr Okoyomon by his lawyer, Alex Iziyon and upheld the decision by the trial court. It held that Nigeria has an obligation under the London Scheme for Extradition, within the Commonwealth, to extradite a person sought in respect of an extradition offence to another Commonwealth country.
“This provision is substantially supported by the provisions of sections 1 and 2 of the Extradition Act 2004. According to the Court of Appeal, the lower court was right to have acted the way it did so as to avoid a situation whereby Nigeria could breach its obligations to the Commonwealth.
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