By Innocent Anaba

LAGOS—The ongoing Will suit challenging the claim to the estate of late billionaire businessman, Jacques Roomans, by his son, Mr. Simon Roomans, before Justice Adedayo Oyebanji, of a Lagos High Court, got to a climax, when Simon, the first claimant in the case, gave his own testimony.

In his detailed witness statement on oath, dated June 13, 2025, and adopted as evidence in court on November 20, Simon deposed that Ms Maria Mahat took advantage of his father’s deteriorating mental health to get him to act out of character and according to her wishes.

He further told the court that any marriage purportedly contrived between his father and Mahat, prior to the official date of the divorce between his parents, on January 22, 2021, was null and void.According to him, it was his father’s relationship with Mahat that led directly to the breakdown of his relationship with his mother, their separation and eventual divorce.

To back up his claims, Simon Roomans tendered volumes of documents, drawn mostly from emails and other documents taken from the servers of his father’s companies, which were part of about 50 gigabytes of data, contained in a flash drive, which he said was sent to him by one of his father’s closest aides and former employee, Mike Luger. counsel to the defendants, challenged Simon’s body of evidence as unreliable and therefore, untenable as evidence in court. The first and second day of hearing were spent tendering the huge volumes of documents, tendered as evidence, by Simon and in back and forth arguments by counsel, over its admissibility.

Lead counsel to the defendants, Mrs. Funke Adekoya, SAN, objected to tendering of the documents as evidence, describing them as, “hear-say evidence,” as defined in the Evidence Act, because they neither originated from the maker or receiver of the evidence.

Both counsel for the 3rd and 4th defendants, Etigwe Uwa, SAN and Adeyinka Aderemi, SAN, aligned with her.Countering, however, counsel to the litigants, Dr. Babatunde Ajibade, SAN, submitted that, indeed, all the documents were tenable as evidence. After examining all the facts before the court, the trial judge, ruled that all the documents were admissible. They were, therefore, admitted in evidence before the court.

When the cross-examination of Simon Roomans opened, Adekoya, SAN, highlighted the physical absence of Simon from his father, as sign of a gap in the relationship between father and son. Simon, though, born in Nigeria, left the country when he was only 9 years old, to attend boarding school in the United Kingdom.  He also hadn’t seen his father since 2015.

But Simon maintained that the relationship between him and his father remained very cordial, until Mahat, saying they were always in touch on telephone.

He cited the several occasions his father created positions for him in his companies, to work with him and he discharged his duties creditably, mentioning the occasions when his father visited him in his various workplaces, like China, and the fact that both his parents attended his wedding in Australia.

Uwa, SAN, counsel representing the 3rd defendant, Mahat, continued the cross-examination of Mr. Simon Roomans, telling the litigant that there was already a gap in the relationship between him and the senior Roomans, which was not caused by Ms. Mahat.

Counsel to the 4th defendant,  Aderemi, SAN, wanted to know if Simon had dementia, to which the latter answered in the negative, as his cross-examination came to a close.

Recalled that in their statements, earlier, both Mr. Rakesh Lal, Project Manager of the Sea Trucks Group operations in Singapore and Marie-José Groenen, a niece of the deceased Jacques Roomans, also cited instances of their own, pointing to the same alleged manipulation of the deceased by the 3rd defendant.

Source; Vanguard News