{"id":73130,"date":"2025-08-14T08:01:12","date_gmt":"2025-08-14T08:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/?p=73130"},"modified":"2025-08-14T08:01:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-14T08:01:12","slug":"court-orders-uba-to-pay-%e2%82%a630m-refund-163592-for-unlawful-account-freeze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/2025\/08\/14\/court-orders-uba-to-pay-%e2%82%a630m-refund-163592-for-unlawful-account-freeze\/","title":{"rendered":"Court Orders UBA to Pay \u20a630m, Refund $163,592 for Unlawful Account Freeze"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Huldah Shado<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The Federal High Court in Abuja has ordered United Bank for Africa (UBA), to pay \u20a630 million in damages and refund $163,592 to Micoz Bluelink Enterprise for unlawfully freezing the company\u2019s account for more than a year.<\/p>\n<p>In a July 25 judgment, released on Wednesday, Justice Peter Lifu ruled that UBA acted without legal justification when it restricted the account and withdrew funds without the customer\u2019s consent or a court order.<\/p>\n<p>He described the bank\u2019s conduct as \u201cultra vires, reckless, and without compassion,\u201d amounting to a breach of the banker-customer relationship.<\/p>\n<p>The dispute began on July 20, 2022, when UBA froze Micoz Bluelink\u2019s domiciliary account holding $163,825.58 without explanation.<\/p>\n<p>Despite repeated requests for clarification, the bank provided none.<\/p>\n<p>On August 19, 2023, it transferred the funds without the company\u2019s approval.<\/p>\n<p>UBA argued the funds were flagged as suspicious, prompting it to file a Suspicious Transaction Report with the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU), and restrict the account pending due diligence.<\/p>\n<p>It said the recall was triggered by a SWIFT instruction from Citi Bank, its correspondent bank.<\/p>\n<p>However, Justice Lifu found the evidence inadequate, noting that the bank\u2019s own document cited \u201cPossible Duplicate\u201d rather than fraud as the reason, insufficient to justify the action.<\/p>\n<p>The court awarded \u20a630 million in damages, ordered the refund of $163,592, and imposed a 10% post-judgment interest until full payment is made.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Huldah Shado &nbsp; The Federal High Court in Abuja has ordered United Bank for Africa (UBA), to pay \u20a630 million in damages and refund $163,592 to Micoz Bluelink Enterprise for unlawfully freezing the company\u2019s account for more than a year. In a July 25 judgment, released on Wednesday, Justice Peter Lifu ruled that UBA [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":73131,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1386,172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-judiciary","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73130"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73132,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73130\/revisions\/73132"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}