Two careers, and what they change.

Hussaini, Ishaq Magaji (SAN) joined the Bauchi State Ministry of Justice as pupil state counsel in 2009 and left as Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions in 2020, carrying contested criminal trials throughout. The Legal Practitioners Privileges Committee conferred the rank of Senior Advocate of Nigeria on him in 2021.

What that changes is when we are useful. The decisions that settle a criminal matter — what goes into the file, which witness the case is rested on, whether a charge is laid at all — are taken long before a courtroom, in an office this firm has worked inside. A defence that waits for the charge is arguing about a file it had no hand in. So we act from the first invitation: EFCC, ICPC, the police, or a regulator's letter that has not yet become anything.

Internal investigations reported to boards under privilege. Representation through interview and charge. Trial and appeal at every level of the Nigerian court system. Much of this work never reaches a charge, which is the intended outcome and rarely the visible one.

In October 2023 Hussaini, Ishaq Magaji (SAN) was appointed the fifth Registrar-General and Chief Executive of the Corporate Affairs Commission, the first Senior Advocate of Nigeria to hold the office.

What that changes is the quality of the answer. Corporate work in Nigeria turns less on the text of the Companies and Allied Matters Act 2020 than on how it is administered: what an examiner looks for, why a filing is queried, how beneficial-ownership disclosure is tested, when a company is exposed to being struck off, where an insolvency practitioner's duty starts. Advice written from the section alone tends to be right and unusable. Ours is written from the operational side.

Regulatory compliance is the bulk of it: licensing and renewal, the filings that keep a company in good standing, enforcement responses, and the correspondence most disputes are still only a letter away from being. Then mining and solid minerals, where title comes from the Mining Cadastre Office and consent comes from the host community, and a project that treats either as a formality stops. Then incorporation and post-incorporation compliance, company secretarial work and board governance, restructuring and insolvency, and beneficial ownership.

Beneficial ownership is the sharpest case of it. The Commission's register of persons with significant control was built out under his tenure as Registrar-General: the filing requirements, the verification behind them, and the enforcement that followed. A company asking who it must disclose, and what happens if it does not, is asking about a system this firm watched being assembled. We have written on where it bites.