Dr. Ope Banwo is the Coordinating Attorney for OmegaPro Action Nigeria (OPANI).
In this exclusive interview with Lukmon Akintola, he speaks on the controversies trailing OmegaPro Forex and Investment Trading Company which allegedly fleeced Nigerian investors of over N200, billion, his efforts at helping the investors recoup their money, and why it is ideal for the company’s promoters to refund commissions received for misleading investors.
OmegaPro Action Nigeria (OPANI), has been in the news for a while, what is the group about?
OmegaPro Action Nigeria is a class of Nigerian investors who lost over N200 billion in a Ponzi scheme orchestrated by a Dubia-based company known as OmegaPro Forex and Investment Trading Company with the active connivance, promotion and marketing by some Nigerian ring leaders that include Daniel Onoja; Bonaventure Igboanugo; Samuel Ajibare; Tomiwa Orunnipin, Dr Afoma Nwolisa; Dr Chinwe Ikpe and many others. The victims of these Dubai-based Nigerian sponsored investment include widows, retirees, high-net-worth individuals, big businesspeople, and even young people just starting in life.
What is your direct involvement with this group?
I speak as the Coordinating Attorney for OmegaPro Action Nigeria (OPANI), with the sole aim of working with other attorneys for the group to recoup all or part of the investment stolen by OmegaPro Forex and Investment Trading Company and to recover whatever we can from the humongous commissions paid to them by their Nigerian enablers that we have been able to identify. The class includes both investors based locally in Nigeria and the diaspora of which I am also one.
How did these investors get involved with OmegaPro Forex and Investment Trading Company?
In 2019, OmegaPro Forex and Investment Trading Company stormed Nigeria with great fanfare claiming to be a forex trading company. It promised Nigerians and investors in general a pathway to financial success. They went as far as giving investors a back office that showed that forex trading was going on in the company, but it was all a lie, it was just a front. Their activities have since been exposed by the USA Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) as an elaborate scam to lure in people interested in forex trading on a global level.Like every businessman or woman, the investors, both locally and abroad were seeking good investment and OmegaPro Forex and Investment Trading Company promised them exactly this. Unknown to them, the Dubai-based firm co-owned by Andreas Szakacs, Dilawar Singh, and Mike Simms, and sponsored into Nigeria by their Nigerian collaborator like Daniel Onoja, Bonaventure and Samuel Ajibare among other top agents in Nigeira, were scammers who used a lot of credible and known personalities as associates and brand ambassadors to deceive Nigerians and many people abroad into believing it was a genuine forex business they were doing. Some of these reputable people they used as props include top level celebrities; top level footballers; globally renowned trainers and even royal princes from Dubai. It eventually turned out, after deep investigations into their histories after they have disappeared with people’s money, that these men have a documented history of previous involvements and indictments in several Ponzi MLM schemes where investors lost billions of dollars and their Nigerian enablers and agents either knew that or should have known that before introducing them to the Nigerian market
You said that the owners of the firm had a negative history as far as investment is concerned, were your clients oblivious to this fact?
The company never came out originally as a Ponzi scheme, so investors were not aware. They went to great lengths to portray the appearance of a legit trading company. However, one fact remains constant. Top leader MLM Diamonds such as Daniel Onoja, Tomiwa Orunnipin, Samuel Ajibare, Leo Bonaventure, and others convinced innocent Nigerians to invest in OmegaPro without doing any due diligence at all, at best, or were willing co-conspirators who sold out their Nigerian brothers and sisters for the huge commissions they were receiving from these Dubai-based OmegaPro company. These Nigerian collaborators of OmegaPro used aggressive and mostly deceptive strategies to dupe unsuspecting Nigerians that the company was into forex when in the real sense they knew, or should have known, that it was a Ponzi scheme from the start. With an intricate web of deception and manipulation, these top leader MLM Diamonds painted the image of a foolproof investment opportunity with high returns and a secure investment environment.They leveraged their status with their trusting followers; some hoodwinking members of their Congregations from their churches, persuading thousands of investors to entrust their hard-earned money with OmegaPro, and even made testimonials of the company’s credibility. Some of them even continued luring people to invest in the bogus company at a time when it was clear OmegaPro was a Ponzi scheme. Their endorsements created an illusion of credibility that typically lured in unsuspecting Nigerians. Aside from this, they kept assuring Nigerian investors that rigorous due diligence had been conducted by them on Omegatron’s Dubai-based owners and operations, implying that it was a legitimate investment. Meanwhile they were collecting 10% commissions from every dollar invested by the unsuspecting members of the public.
Since you commenced this recovery agenda, you have been mentioning some names repeatedly, people such as Daniel Onoja, Tomiwa Orunnipin, and Bonaventure Igboanugo, who are they?
They are the people who either brought OmegaPro to Nigeria and claimed they have thoroughly investigated them, those who marketed OmegaPro in Nigeria at top levels and collected millions of dollars in commission from those they lured to invest in the scheme, and those who vouched for the credibility of their masters in Dubai even when questions were first raised. The leaders we keep referring to are the ones they call DIAMONDS, some of whom were making over $50,000 a week at some point from all the commissions they collected from the unsuspecting public. Specifically the names of some of these top level enablers of the OmegaPro scam in Nigeria and who got to become literally billionaires overnight, apart from the main agents Daniel Onoja, Bonaventure Igboanugo and Samuel Ajibare, include other names such as Grace Udenwa Udoye, Wuraola Fadairo Orunupin, Olasebikan Oladapo, Maryann Ilorah, Chinwe Ikpe, Ajibare Olushola Ebunoluwa, Dotun Fatoyinbo,. Dr Afoma Nwolisa, and Matthew Ogunmodede. They all marketed OmegaPro aggressively touting its legitimacy and potential for lucrative earnings while they skim off 10% at the top from each investment as commissions. They deliberately lured Nigerian investors into investing in what they knew to be a Ponzi scheme all for the sake of collecting that commission that has enable some of them to build estates, acquire N400milloin cars and live larger than life while their victims cry in misery. As mentioned, for their shady efforts to get their Nigerian brothers and sisters to sign up to the scheme, these top promoters collected a 10 per cent commission from the OmegaPro Dubai company as a finder’s fee from the investment of every unsuspecting investor they referred to the fake ‘forex trading’ scheme. At the height of this mega fraud, these top agents and promoters earned over $50,000 weekly as finders’ fee commissions from 1000s of unsuspecting Nigerians whom they kept leading to believe that OmegaPro was a legit Forex Trading Company. Cumulatively, they earned over $ 10 million just in commissions in less than 3 years. They used the illegal commissions and proceeds from this OmegaPro Ponzi scheme to buy huge mansions in choice places in Nigeria, Canada, the USA, and the United Kingdom. Daniel Onoja, the biggest agent and enabler of this scheme in Nigeria, recently celebrated the purchase of a multi-million-dollar house in Canada and a brand new Gwagon costing over N400million (which he proudly kept celebrating), while Leo Bonaventure, not too long ago posted videos of the housewarming of his own amazing multi-billion naira estate in Lagos. Bonaventure also recently used some of the proceeds of the OmegaPro commissions to obtain a micro-banking license.
The figures you just mentioned are scary and mind boggling, what is the magnitude of this fraud?
The fraud cost investors over N200 Billion in Nigeria alone, from those we represent, with over $100 Billion of investors’ money stolen in over 70 countries around the world. The Omegapro Dubai-based owners, Dilawar, Singh, and Paulo, and other top agents who shared all this money are now in the wind as fugitives from local and international justice.
At what point did these investors realize they had lost their money?
In September 2022, OmegaPro Dubai leaders, their collaborators all over the world, and Nigeria suddenly announced that the company’s system has been hacked, and it stopped releasing payments of matured investments to investors all over the world. A few weeks later, the Dubai owners announced that they were migrating all their investors’ accounts to a new company called Brokers Domain until they could fix the breach in their system. Investors all over the world started getting nervous with some asking tough questions. Then around April 2022, while over $100 billion of investors’ money in over 70 countries remained frozen, the owners and their top agents and collaborators announced the formation of a new company called ‘Go Global’ and began aggressively recruiting OmegaPro investors to invest in the new company with promises that their investments in OmegaPro would soon be released. Many investors fell for this and started promoting the new Go Global company, while others started seeing the handwriting on the wall. Finally, in August 2023, the OmegaPro owners based in Dubai, and their top promoters and agents announced that they would not be able to pay anyone’s OmegaPro investment because the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) had frozen their accounts over some investigations affecting one of their partners named Mike Simms. However, despite their bogus claim of OmegaPro money being frozen in the USA, they could not explain how OmegaPro money could have been seized in the USA when they had earlier confirmed that the company does not have any office in the USA, and did not have any license to operate direct or financial transactions in the USA. As suspicions grew, with many investors asking for more details of this shocking announcement, OmegaPro leaders abruptly closed their doors, and many of their top Nigerian agents and promoters also went underground, leaving thousands of investors all over the world, including over 250,000 Nigerian investors in despair.
So how does OPANII hope to achieve its goal of getting back this money?Like I said earlier, we want to recover part or all the funds that investors lost, and we have a bold 10-point Plan of Action that we have released to the public. What we are doing right now, is the first point in our 10-point plan of recovery of the funds lost by investors, and it starts with those who championed the project in Nigeria and getting them to see the moral, legal and ethical obligation for them to refund the commissions they were paid for luring their compatriots into the illegal Ponzi scheme. We are on a mission to first get OmegaPro agents, endorsers, collaborators, and marketers who profited the most from the scam in collecting 10% -20% commissions from signing up unsuspecting members of the public to refund part of the income earned and then help us go after the other nine action points. These partners, enablers and agents of the Dubai-based scammers cannot be allowed to keep the proceeds of a scam, a dummy was sold to over 250,000 Nigerians and over five million people worldwide. Their fraudulent action has had devastating global consequences, resulting in financial losses exceeding $100 billion worldwide and N200 billion in Nigeria alone. These actions have left victims including rich and poor, widows and retirees, grappling with the aftermath of shattered dreams and stolen investments and its time we go after them. Dubai-based scammers come to Nigeira with the help of Nigerian collaborators to scam people of their money, yet its Nigeria the world wants to give a bad name as a scamming nation. We will use Interpol, Political action, civil action, name-and-shame strategies and more to get them to refund some or all of this money.
Earlier you said that OmegaPro promoters have all gone underground, how do you hope to find them?
We have several strategies, which I could not fully divulge to you, but some of which include appealing to the core promoters of the Ponzi scheme conspiracy in Nigeria to do the right thing and lead us and the authorities to their paymasters or be the ones to answer for it with the criminal courts. We also plan on getting Interpol alerts for them since this is a $100Billion scam affecting people in over 70 countries. We will appeal to governments and foreign immigration services where these scammers and their enablers are hiding. We also plan to appeal to Dubai Sheikh and Princes to help us bring these international scammers to justice.I continue to affirm that we are not focusing on the Nigerian OmegaPro co-conspirators in this scam alone or leaving out foreign influencers, Dubai royals, owners of the company, and others, but charity must begin at home with good faith effort by those who led us into this in the first place refunding some or all the commission they earned from selling this illegal Ponzi scheme to Nigerians. It is not a punishment or a vendetta. Refunding some of the commissions is only a fair, just, humane, and classy thing to do. Unfortunately people like Daniel Onoja, Bonaventure Igboanugo, Samuel Ajibare, Dr Afoma Nwolisa, Dr Chinwe Ikpe, Mrs. Olaniyi Karis, Matthew Ogunmodede, Raymond Akam, Olaosebikan Oladipupo and many top leaders in this global conspiracy do not seem to agree that refunding the commissions they got form selling out their trusting family members and followers is the right thing to do, and on that we continue to disagree with them. Our strategy is in stages and depending on the outcome of each stage, we will continue to progress until we achieve our goal. However, I can tell you that if we don’t get the desired response from the agents and promoters of OmegaPro, we will be forced to escalate to the level of petitioning the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Interpol, and file a class action lawsuit. The arm of the law is long, and it will eventually catch up with all agents and promoters of the scheme.
This is a setback to President Tinubu’s efforts to encourage foreign investment in Nigeria, are you involving the government in bring these people to book?
This is not even about foreigners investing in Nigeria. These Dubai-based gentlemen, along with their Nigerian co-conspirators, actually came to take out money from our economy using Omegapro Ponzi scheme. The Dubai-based owners of Omegapro did not invest a dime in Nigerian but came here to take out over N200 Billion from our economy after giving about 10 per cent of that as commissions to their local co-conspirators who sold out their own compatriots. This scandal is more about foreigners trying to damage our economy using local stooges to sell Ponzi schemes to mop our country’s economy only to take off to Dubai. So, like I told you earlier, at some point, the government will get involved to help us contact the Dubai government whom many suspect to be shielding these Omegapro owners from justice and hopefully achieve a diplomatic breakthrough that will make Dubai bring these people to justice.
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