Bertin Agba, the Togolese businessman is no more. Forced into exile since 2013, the former managing director of the Togolese security and guarding company OPS, died abroad on Friday. The Kouméa native died at the age of 54.
The late Agba was an influential businessman whose reputation was revealed in the 2010s following an international fraud case of which Abbas Yousef, an Emirati from Abu Dhabi, was allegedly the victim.
Bertin Agba allegedly passed himself off as Togo’s interior minister. Following the victim’s complaint, he was arrested and detained in the premises of the National Intelligence Agency before being transferred to the civil prison of Lomé on March 21, 2011.
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Bertin Agba appeared before an investigating judge for the first time on March 25, 2011. He acknowledged the facts and his request for release was de facto rejected.
Bertin Agba, a controversial businessman
A native of Kouméa, Bertin Sow Agba headed the Togolese security and guarding company OPS, which employed more than 800 agents at the time of the events.
In 1990, he was arrested at the Aflao border with a stillborn baby in a suitcase. Imprisoned, then released, he will later be suspected of drug trafficking without being worried. He also took part in a vast scam against the director general of the Union Togolaise de Banques Alexis Lamseh Looky, and he was suspected of having extracted nearly four billion CFA francs from him.
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At the time of his arrest, Bertin Agba was the owner of a luxurious villa, two private jets, now stranded in Ghana, and several luxury cars. He would have made benefit from the money of this scam to caciques of the Togolese regime.
Several precautionary measures have been taken against him: his bank accounts have been frozen, his company sealed and his two personal planes immobilized in Ghana.
On 16 April 2013 Bertin Agba was granted provisional release. On June 1, 2013, he fled Lomé to an unknown destination. An international arrest warrant has been issued against him.
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