Neda Bernards Imasuen, Edo South senator, who was the mastermind of a sprawling bank heist in the United States before fleeing to Nigeria to pursue a successful career in politics, has announced his plan to join the ruling All Progressives Congress on June 12.

Mr Imasuen, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Ethics, Privileges and Public Petitions, disclosed his next political move in Benin City on Sunday, marking his second year in office.

“I will be leaving the Labour Party to the APC as the current disarray in the LP will not help me achieve my aim for my people,” Mr Imasuen said.

The lawmaker stated that his defection from the Labour Party is to align Edo South with the Tinubu-led federal government.

“My movement will also help align Edo South with the federal government and bring development to our people,” Mr Imasuen said.

When he joins the APC on June 12, Nigeria’s Democracy Day, Mr Imasuen will be the latest among opposition politicians to dump their parties to join the ruling party.

His defection comes a few months after Peoples Gazette exclusively reported his sordid antecedents in New York before he fled to Nigeria to join politics.

U.S. court filings seen by The Gazette showed the senator was disbarred for life in New York for taking money from a client without representing her. He also blew off subpoenas from disciplinary panels of the New York State court system. 

Mr Imasuen was named in a criminal court case as the facilitator of a vast fraud that bilked more than $25 million from a host of financial institutions across the U.S.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said Mr Imasuen was the lawyer “who arranged the transactions underlying the substantive bank fraud charges in the indictment,” according to a review of a case involving the lawmaker’s co-conspirator, Imran Ismile Badoolah.

The amount of fraudulent mortgage loans by Mr Imasuen and his co-conspirators exceeded $25 million, according to a federal grand jury indictment on December 14, 2012.

Prosecutors said Messrs. Imasuen and Badoolah’s scheme targeted no fewer than 33 banks, including ABN Amro, Citibank, HSBC, Wells Fargo, and Lehman Brothers.

The fraud involved using straw buyers with good credit scores to secure loans after being financially induced, an act that violated federal law and intended to defraud the financial institutions that issued the loans.