By Saidu Idris
365Daily – A United States of America Court has postponed the trial of one of the aides to Govern Dapo Abiodun of Ogun State, Abidemi Rufai, who was indicted for alleged conspiracy, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, to 2022.
Rufai has since been suspended by the Governor.
On May 14, 2021, Rufai was arrested at the JFK Airport, New York, over an alleged $350,000 COVID-19 unemployment fraud in the United States.
His indictment alleged that he used stolen identities of more than 100 Washington residents to file fraudulent claims with the Employment Security Department (ESD) for pandemic-related unemployment benefits.
According to the acting US Attorney, Tessa M. Gorman, Rufai filed fraudulent unemployment claims with Hawaii, Wyoming, Massachusetts, Montana, New York, and Pennsylvania, using variations of a single email address in an attempt to evade automatic detection by fraud systems.
The prosecutor had submitted a 97,000-page material at the U.S. District for the Western District of Washington at Tacoma, on July 26.
The trial, earlier scheduled to commence on August 31, has now been postponed to February 1, 2022, an extension of 5 months, based on an agreement between the prosecution and the defence that the case is “unusual and complex”.
According to Judge Benjamin Settle of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, pretrial motions “shall be filed no later than December 9, 2021”, and fixed pretrial conference for January 24, 2022 at 10:00 a.m.