At about 8pm WAT on Thursday February 23, 2023, we noticed the suspension of our website by cloud service providers, DigitalOcean.

We found out this was due to a FALSE allegation of copyright infringement lodged by people acting on behalf of Landwey. FIJ has since provided explanations to DigitalOcean.

The facts of the matter are as follows:

That the allegation of copyright infringement is FALSE;

That FIJ has full copyright in the published article, and it is about the failure of Wale Ayilara’s Landwey, a real estate investment company, to hand property over to a UAE-based Nigerian despite receiving a payment of N42 million from him;

That, in April 2022, after the story was published, Ayilara sent an intermediary to FIJ’s Founder/Editor-in-Chief ‘Fisayo Soyombo asking what could be done to get the story taken down;

That FIJ is therefore shocked to learn that a story for which Ayilara sought to strike a deal is now being reported as violating an unknown website’s copyright infringement;

That by suspending FIJ’s domain, DigitalOcean has not only truncated the freedom of the press, it has very consciously aligned itself with evil men in the Nigerian society who take money from the public without providing the promised service;

FIJ assures our readers that our website would be back up in a matter of hours, just as it happened with previous frivolous inventions of copyright infringement.

Signed: FIJ’s Editorial Board