The Court of Appeal sitting in Port Harcourt has struck down a 15-month-old order that froze 124 bank accounts linked to businesswoman Aisha Achimugu, founder of Oceangate Engineering Oil and Gas Limited, ruling that keeping the accounts locked down for so long on a one-sided application amounted to an abuse of court process.
In a lead judgment written by Justice Muhammad Ibrahim Sirajo, and joined by Justices Ishaq Mohammed Sani and Eleojo Enenche, the appellate panel delivered a mixed outcome in an appeal brought by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) on July 24, 2026, against an earlier Federal High Court decision.
How the dispute started
The freezing order traces back to April 10, 2025, when the Federal High Court, on an ex parte application, restrained 124 accounts belonging to Achimugu and companies linked to her, including Drive.FGC.Net and Felak Concepts Limited. Records show the Drive.FGC.Net current account held about ₦50.5 million and the Felak Concepts account held roughly ₦16.2 million at the time.
Two weeks later, on April 24, 2025, the EFCC directed SunTrust Bank to move funds out of a fixed deposit account (number 0001313173) into a recovery account held with the Central Bank of Nigeria. The sum transferred was ₦1.8 billion, and investigators separately flagged a further ₦7.79 billion sitting in related internal ledger accounts.
Achimugu pushed back in court on May 25, 2025, challenging both the freeze and the transfer. On August 27, 2025, Justice Turaki Adamu of the Federal High Court sided with her on the transfer, declaring the ₦1.8 billion movement unlawful because it breached the standing freeze order, and directed that the money be reversed.
What the appellate court decided
The EFCC appealed that reversal, and the Court of Appeal delivered a split ruling. On the freezing order itself, the panel held that letting an ex parte restraint run unchallenged for over 15 months could not be justified and vacated the entire April 2025 order.
On the ₦1.8 billion transfer, however, the appellate court went the other way and set aside the trial court’s reversal order. Justice Sirajo pointed to a gap in the evidence: the accounts actually covered by the freezing order held only about ₦50.5 million between them, so the trial judge had no basis for tying the much larger ₦1.8 billion movement to those specific frozen accounts. The panel was careful to stress that this finding was about the evidentiary basis for the reversal order, not an endorsement of the EFCC’s decision to move the funds in the first place.
The court also dismissed two other arguments raised by the EFCC: that the trial judgment was invalid because it was delivered during the court’s annual vacation, and that the commission had been denied fair hearing. On the latter point, the panel noted both sides had filed detailed affidavits before the trial court ruled. Separately, the appellate court affirmed a broader principle — that trial judges retain the power to make consequential orders to protect the subject matter of a case — but only where the evidence clearly identifies which accounts are actually in dispute.
Net effect
Taken together, the Court of Appeal partly allowed the EFCC’s appeal: the order reversing the ₦1.8 billion transfer has been set aside, while the 124-account freezing order that started the dispute has been vacated entirely.