By A jury at Wood Green Crown Court has convicted Gafar Bakare, Zainab Bakare and Saheedat Bakare of laundering the proceeds of two North London Class A drugs lines, and the eldest of that family is not in London at all. She is in Lagos, where she holds the All Progressives Congress ticket for the Surulere Constituency I seat in the Lagos State House of Assembly, taken in May after she buried the incumbent, Desmond Elliot, in a primary that ended his run in the chamber.
The trial ran for five weeks. The prosecution case, as recorded by the prosecuting chambers, is that the two drugs lines were owned and spearheaded by Gafar Bakare and made approximately £320,000 over a twelve-month period, and that the defendants acted together to deposit the cash and layer it through multiple bank accounts in order to obscure where it came from. The jury convicted all three of them. They return to the same court in December 2026 to be sentenced.
They are not the whole family in the dock. Their mother is also alleged to have taken part in the offending, and her own trial is listed to take place in the autumn of 2028. She has been convicted of nothing, and the case against her has not been heard.
The family name is the first document. On the register at Companies House, the convicted brother is not plain Gafar Bakare. His registered name is Gafar Bakare Odunuga, the only officer on the entire register carrying that combination of names, and it is the Lagos candidate's own compound name, which Nigerian official lists render in both orders, as Odunuga-Bakare and as Bakare-Odunuga. His company, Gafar Consultants Limited, was appointed to him in December 2014 and has since been dissolved. His date of birth on the register is June 1987, and the address on it is 35 Kendal House, Collier Street, in Islington.
His sister's paper trail runs the same way. Companies House carries three dissolved companies tied to Zainab Bakare: two separate companies, each named Zainab Bakare Limited, from 2016 and 2018, and Outram Consult Ltd, which she took in 2022. Every one of them is dissolved. Her date of birth on the records is November 1988, and the addresses on them sit inside the same Islington square mile, at Campbell Walk and at Jersey House on Clifton Road.
Records in possession of SecretsReporters close the question of whose family this is. The electoral roll for 2012, and again across 2013 to 2016, records one household in London N1 where Barakat O Odunuga Bakare lived alongside Gafar O Bakare Odunuga, Zainab Bakare and Saidat O Bakare, the roll's spelling of the third sister, in a wider family home that carried their other siblings as well. She lived, in that Islington house, with the very siblings who carried out the crimes: the brother who ran the drugs lines and the sisters who laundered the proceeds. Barakat, born on 10 March 1986, is the eldest of the four. Gafar follows her by fifteen months, and Zainab was born in November 1988.
London is not foreign ground to the candidate. Her own published profile records that after her schooling in Surulere she crossed over to the College of North East London for her A-levels, took her law degree at the University of Bedfordshire and followed it with a master's degree in International Commercial Law. The electoral roll places her in that Islington household in the years it covers.
In Lagos, none of this is in her story. The profile the public knows is of a daughter of the Oshodi, Olorogun Adodo and Onisemo royal families of Isale Eko, a councillor who rose to Leader of the Surulere Legislative Council, a Special Adviser on Housing to Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, and the campaign secretary who helped deliver Surulere in 2023 for President Bola Tinubu, Governor Sanwo-Olu, Femi Gbajabiamila and Desmond Elliot himself. In May 2026 she turned on the last of them. Backed openly by Gbajabiamila, now Chief of Staff to the President, she took the APC primary from Elliot by more than eleven thousand votes to his 270, and Elliot, who withdrew from the exercise alleging intimidation and rejected its outcome, has since gone back to the film set.
No charge touches Mrs Odunuga-Bakare herself. She is not a defendant in the London case, she is not named in it, and nothing in the convictions alleges that she laundered one pound or knew what her siblings were washing.
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