The Nigerian Merchant Navy Officers and Water Transport Senior Staff Association has said that it is considering legal option to compel those who are in the habit of attaching Merchant Navy to the name of their organizations with the intent to defraud members of the public to do away with the title.
The National President of the association, Comrade Engineer Matthew Alalade who disclosed this in an interview with newsmen in Lagos yesterday said that all efforts by the association to proscribe them in the past yielded little or no result as the fraudsters were in the habit of coming up with another nomenclature once the ones they initially registered with were proscribed.
Alalade informed that they had written to the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) last two years urging it not to register any organization with Merchant Navy attached to their name, an appeal he said the Commission acknowledged and put into force but regretted that these fraudster having learnt of this development, no longer bother to approach the Commission for registration thereby operating illegally.
According to him,” A lot of them are coming up and in a country, we should have one Merchant Navy and Merchant Navy is a gazetted name in the register of Trade Union in the Ministry of Labour. So, nobody must go and use that name.
“You can remember about two or three years ago, they proscribed about three outfits with Merchant Navy affixed to their names and these people are coming up all over the places disguised with another names again, once they proscribe one, they come up with another name again. So, our prayer is that anybody using Merchant Navy attached to their organization must drop it”.
He pointed out that because these people who float these organizations with Merchant Navy attached to their names had dubious intent, they go about duping innocent Nigerians of huge sums of money in the guise of giving them security job on the Nigerian waters and they claimed to do Nigerian Navy job too.
“The job of Merchant Navy is sea faring, go and get your certificate of competency and go to the sea. Their job is to dupe innocent members of the public of huge sums of money”, he said.
On what effort were they putting on their own to arrest the situation, Alalade who is also the Auditor of the Trade Union Congress (TUC) said,”We can’t do it on our own, we are calling on the government, all the security agencies like the Police, we have notified them on the development, so, it is left for the government to do something. That is why we are sensitizing the public to verify well, innocent people are falling into these people’s trap and are losing huge sums of money to them. We have only one Merchant Navy and it is only government that will go after them. The Nigerian Navy had gone after these people in the past, even while wanting to engage in security job, they want to do the Nigerian Navy job too.
“Sometime, last two years, we wrote to the Corporate Affairs Commission and we urged them to stop registering organizations seeking registration with Merchant Navy attached to their names and they sticked to it then but some of them are not registered, they just set up an office and start operating. But we are contemplating going to the court to get injunction against anybody using that name”.
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