Bishop arrested for defrauding church members of N5M

A man of God, Bishop Ginika Obi has been arrested by the Enugu State Police Command for allegedly defrauding his church members and other members of the public to the tune of N500 million.

News Agency of Nigeria [NAN] reports that Bishop Obi, the Founder and General Overseer of City of Liberation and Comfort Ministry in Enugu, the state capital, was arrested after being on the run for over three months.

Confirming the arrest of the Bishop, the State Police Public Relations Officer [PPRO], DSP Ebere Amaraizu said that the suspect had set up a fake financial NGO with the aim of empowering participants but ended up fleecing them of their hard earned money without the promised returns.

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“Bishop Ginika Obi, in-charge of City of Liberation and Comfort Ministry, is now helping police operatives of the Commissioner of Police, Enugu Monitoring Unit, following his arrest over the weekend in a hotel in Enugu where he has been taking refuge.

Before now, the suspect who hails from Umuaku in Uli community of Ihiala Local Government Area in Anambra State, was also in-charge of an alleged financial Non-Governmental Organisation [NGO] known as 'Build Your Generational Organisation', where his victims are made to invest with a hope of reaping a bumper financial dividend.

It was gathered that his victims are numerous and with various degrees of complaints of the huge amount of money swindled from them without anything to show for it.

The suspect, on noticing that police were on his trail based on complaints of alleged swindling of some suspected members of the public to the tune of N500 million with his wife and some of his eight alleged pastors, disappeared for months.

The bishop, however, left his wife in Enugu Prisons custody over the matter. During his disappearance from Enugu, preliminary investigations revealed that he had escaped and relocated to Asaba in Delta State to avoid being nabbed by police operatives for months.

It was further gathered that luck ran out on the suspect over the weekend as he was trailed based on intelligence information, to a hotel at Amechi Road off Agbani Road in Enugu where police operatives acting on a tip-off nabbed him," the PPRO said in a statement.

However, Bishop Obi reportedly told the police during interrogation that the amount of money he defrauded his members was not N500 million but N186 million, adding that he did not know the financial NGO he set up together with his wife would turn out that way.

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Some of the suspect’s victims, Blessing Edekin, a widow, Nnenna Okonkwo and Chidiebere Okolo, expressed their delight following the arrest of the run-away Bishop, said they were defrauded of various sums of money by the man of God who later disappeared into thin air when they started asking for the returns he had promised them.