Nigerian president's lawyer rejects bribery allegation

An advocate of Nigeria's president has denied his culpability in a bribery allegation leveled against him in a lawsuit bordering on corruption in the west African country.

Kola Awodein, a senior advocate of Nigeria and private counsel of President Muhammadu Buhari, was on Tuesday implicated in an ongoing trial of a Federal High Court judge accused of corruption in Abuja, the nation's capital.

In a statement issued Wednesday by the office of the Nigerian president, Awodein dismissed the allegation as "malicious, utterly ridiculous, and revolting."

Local media reported Wednesday that a witness in the ongoing trial of Justice Niyi Ademola, who's standing trial in Nigeria, said Awodein had bribed the judge the sum of 500,000 naira (1,574 U.S. dollars) in 2015, at the behest of Buhari, then a presidential candidate.

The lawyer was representing Buhari in court during a contrived certificate issue affecting him as the presidential candidate of Nigeria's current governing party back then. Ademola was the presiding judge on the case.

Awodein said although he had known the judge for more than three and half decades, he never attempted to give him any bribe while presiding on Buhari's court case.

"It is a fact that the sum of money mentioned was personally paid by me as a friend to Justice Ademola as a personal gift, as our custom well recognizes and demands, on the occasion of his daughter's high society wedding solemnized at the Cathedral Church of Christ, Marina, Lagos, on May 9, 2015, which I attended in person.

"I was fully convinced then, as I remain today, that I could do no less as a friend of longstanding to fairly reasonably support him on that memorable occasion of his daughter's wedding," the president's lawyer said.

Awodein exonerated the Nigerian leader from having any link whatsoever with the accused judge, noting the news story currently being peddled was affecting the person of Buhari, who came to power promising to fight endemic corruption in Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation.

Last year, the government launched a crackdown on judges accused of corrupt practices soon after Buhari sought the support of the judiciary in the anti-corruption campaign, saying that arm of government must remain impartial in playing its role in the fight against corruption.

Ademola and his wife, also a former public officer in Nigeria, are alleged to have been involved in corrupt practices committed between February 2014 and June 2016, contrary to Section 8 of the Nigerian Independent Corrupt Practices Commission Act, 2011 and Section 115 of the Penal Code Law. Endit