Nigerian Pastor Defrauded His Parishioners Of $100 Mln!

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Sunday Adelaja was once greatly loved by his parishioners. Now he is hated by many of them for his involvement in a huge scam worth $100 million that left them homeless beggars.

Nigerian-born Sunday Adelaja is the founder and senior pastor of the Embassy of God, an evangelical-charismatic church founded in Ukraine, the eastern European country formed after the collapse of the USSR.

Sunday Sunkanmi Adelaja represents Yoruba ethnic group and hails from Ogun state; he was born in the village of Idomla in Ijebu-Ode local government area. He left Nigeria at the age of 19 to study in the Soviet Union. After the USSR’s collapse, Adelaja settled in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, where he started his preaching activity-Naij.com

The Embassy of God was founded in 2002. The church claims to have 25,000 members in Kyiv and many more elsewhere in Ukraine. However, many of his parishioners left the church after his involvement in a huge fraud worth at least $100 million. Sunday Adelaja is also known for his close ties with the infamous former Kyiv city mayor Leonid Chernovecki, who fled Ukraine after accusations of involvement in huge corruption scandals.

Sunday Adelaja secured his family’s wealth at the expense of his naive parishioners.

Sunday Adelaja is married with three kids. His son, aged 17, and two daughters aged  15 and 12, hold the US citizenship.

Sunday Adelaja owns three luxury cars – Mercedes-Benz W221 Carlsson (S-Class), Mercedes-Benz CL63 AMG (CL -class) and Mercedes-Benz C-Class.

Besides that, his family owns multimillion properties in the US – five houses and lands in Sacramento, California.  Adelaja lives in a luxury four-storeyed mansion in Kyiv’s suburb next to the house of the head of the Ukraine’s national bank.

But while Sunday Adelaja frequently claimed that his wealth is acquired by the grace of God, many of his former parishioners who left the church accuse the pastor of defrauding them of huge amounts of money and call him the devil in the flesh.

Ukraine’s law enforcement officials accuse Adelaja of being involved in the dealings of Kings Capital, a financial group led by a member of his congregation.

One of Sunday Adelaja’s victims, Lubov Vetrova, told that her husband committed suicide after Sunday Adelaja convinced him to invest $ 80,000 in the Kings Capitalfund which subsequently flopped. Since that her family found themselves homeless in the streets.

The head of the Kyiv police Vitaly Yarema told the press that in that way the fraudsters led by the pastor have stolen  at least $ 100 million of Kings Capital’smoney invested by the defrauded parishioners, and have stolen additional $8.5 million from a Ukrainian bank.

Sunday Adelaja denies the accusations but some prominent members of the Christian community in Ukraine accuse him of saying monstrous lie.

“I am outraged by the monstrous Sunday Adelaja’s lie and the arrogance with which he distributes it”, told Ukrainian pastor Serhiy Shidlovsky, who has become one of the victims of the King’s Capital’s scam but luckily lost only 1,000 euro.

“I personally attended many meetings where pastor Sunday Adelaja was not only calling to invest all the money in the Kings Capital, but also mockingly laughed at those who have not done it yet!” says Shidlovsky , adding that “I personally sat in the hall when he explained to everyone how important it is to take out a loan secured by their real estate and invest it in this company.”

 “I live in the street because of this swindler,” told the press another pastor’s victim, who declined to be identified.

“I am extremely outraged by this situation, because I personally believed pastor Sunday”, told the former Kings Capital worker Irina Schwartz, accusing Adelaja of personally masterminding this huge scam.

Renowned pastor Rick Renner has told that Adelaja’s fraud and his arrogant behaviour brought colossal damage to the Protestant movement in Ukraine, while the official Ukrainian orthodox church considers Sunday Adelaja to be inspired and possibly even possessed by the devil.

“Pre-trial investigation established that the said person in the period from May 2006 to November 2008 with the help of legal entities JC & AA Kings Capital Limited, Kings Capital, LLC Kings Capital and others seized funds of 3,500 citizens by fraud totaling in more than 140 million damages. The indictment consists of more than a thousand volumes, the case hearing are in the Kyiv Dniprovsky district court,” – told the Ukrainian law enforcement representatives in an official statement.

The on-going court hearings may take years, during that time the pastor denied leaving Ukraine.

Earlier Ghanaian Bishop Isaac Owusu Bempah, founder and leader of the Glorious Word Power Ministries International, has labeled two of Nigeria’s celebrated pastors, pastor TB Joshua and pastor Chris as partners in winning souls for the devil.