Neelu’s connection to Dr Akena Adoko

Many thanks to our reader JW for pointing this one out: it seems that for some years, Neelu had a long-standing relationship with a Dr Akena Adoko, a Ugandan gentleman with a strange and disturbing history.

According to his 2010 obituary in the Ugandan  Daily Monitor, Dr Adoko was “the independence-era spy chief who may have played an inadvertent role in the final ascendance of Idi Amin”. Quite an assertion!

The obituary claims that Dr Adoko

…secretly planned to topple Obote but was upstaged by Amin. According to this account, as told to Mr Kalyegira by Erisa Kanagwa, Dr Adoko, backed by British intelligence, was let down by a careless leak that allowed Amin to stage his own coup, fearing that Dr Adoko’s rise would herald a purge of certain elements in the military. “Amin’s was in fact a counter-coup,” Mr Kalyegira wrote. “This extraordinary new information, provided and verified by Kanagwa, indicates that Akena Adoko, Obote’s cousin and head of the GSU, had planned to overthrow Obote in a coup backed by the British.”

Certainly, President Milton Obote’s secret police, the “General Service Unit”, were responsible for many human rights abuses and cruelties in Uganda; Dr Adoko served as first head of that organisation, which “reported on suspected subversives”.

Dr Adoko’s adventures did not cease when he left Uganda after the rise of Idi Amin. He began practicing law in London in the early 1970s, but ultimately became the second name on the infamous list of Vexatious Litigants (Sabine and Belinda’s friend Terence Ewing occupies a place on the same list).

It’s worth reading the 2004 judgement on how Dr Adoko earned that honour, if only to appreciate the eye-wateringly long list of offences and missteps that brought him there.

As for Dr Adoko’s prowess as a lawyer…

On the website adoko.altervista.org, a few of his cases stand out:

a) In Adoko vs. Jemal, Curtis J described some of Dr Adoko’s arguments as “manifest nonsense.” He went on to say, “In my judgment, there is no genuine excuse for being out of time in this case. I regret to say that I find Dr Adoko, though extremely courteous, confused in his mind and, as I say, there is a lack of frankness, as the respondent has complained about. In those circumstances I unhesitatingly refuse to grant the application for …. “

b) Coroner Dr Elizabeth Stearns was sufficiently unimpressed with Dr Adoko to refuse him leave to represent Ms Berry and family in her court during the inquest held on the 11th and 12 September 2001 into the circumstances surrounding the death of baby Sunaina Chaudhari. …

d) In Dr Akena Adoko vs. The Law Society, it transpired that after his return to the UK from practicing in Uganda and Tanzania, Dr Adoko sought to become a solicitor. The Law Society refused to let him do so unless he passed their Professional Conduct and Account examination as he did not have 8 years’ experience of practice in England and Wales which, at that time, was a requirement laid down by the Law Society in their guidelines as a pre-condition to exempting barristers from taking that examination. Despite his claims that his international experience should be sufficient to exempt him from this examination, Dr Adoko was obliged to sit the examination. His results were in the range 40% – 44%.

How did Neelu become acquainted with Dr Adoko?

As with many things in Neelu’s life, the answer takes us back to the very sad death of her niece, Sunaina, from a congenital disorder. According to a 2004 judgement in the High Court of Justice, it happened like this:

22. In paragraph 2 of section 1 [Dr Rita Pal] describes herself as a practicing doctor and a writer/columnist and a human rights campaigner. She has founded and edited a website called http://www.nhs-exposed.com. In paragraph 3 she states that on occasions her colleagues and her are asked by patients to investigate potential or ongoing complaints against one or more branches of the Health Service. Having examined the material, independent opinion on the standard of care is, it is said, provided. “… [T]he service is provided free of charge and, on the understanding that our findings would be fair, unbiased and firmly based on scientific evidence.”

23. Dr Pal claims to have assisted a number of families thereby to obtain justice. She notes that if the families are not happy with the opinion they “cease contact” and “indeed develop an antagonism towards us.”

24. In the beginning of the year 2001, so paragraph 4 states, Miss Neelu Berry approached Dr Pal and her colleagues regarding the death of her niece, Sunania Chaudhuri. In paragraph 5 it is stated that it was Miss Berry’s belief that Sunania had been murdered. Paragraph 5 continues: “Over a period of several weeks we examined approximately 2000 pages of medical notes and other documentary evidence, and carried out extensive background research.”
The paragraph goes on to state that “although there were aspects of Sunania’s care that left something to be desired” “there was no scientific evidence to support” the suspicions of murder. “The outcome of the inquest also stated natural causes.” Dr Pal describes the case as very time consuming and one of the most difficult and demanding cases she had ever done.

25. Paragraph 6 refers to a long and detailed series of emails attempting to explain “our findings to Miss Berry.” “Eventually Miss Berry appeared to accept our conclusions and asked me for advice regarding lawyers who might represent her.” Paragraph 6 continues:”I suggested that she contacted a number of firms, and also informed her that I had heard that Dr Adoko had a good reputation as a barrister.” She knew him, so paragraph 6 states, only by reputation and she was “unaware that he had undergone disciplinary proceedings in 1997 and had become voluntarily disbarred shortly before the result of these proceedings was implemented.”

26. Paragraph 7 states that Miss Berry contacted Dr Adoko in May 2001 and that “it was decided that we should prepare a medical report for him to use as a basis for his legal report.” Dr Pal took three weeks out of work and with the help of a consultant paediatrician produced a final draft report in excess of a 100 pages.

27. Paragraph 8 refers to a report prepared by Dr Adoko which, so it appears, reached conclusions different to those reached by Dr Pal, being conclusions which caused her great concern as being “scientifically incorrect”. She states that she began to fear that “our report will be distorted to support Dr Adoko’s suppositions.” In paragraph 9 she states that she felt that such distortion would be totally unacceptable. She “offered the family a compromise; I would either send the report directly to the coroner, or I would withdraw it altogether.”

28. Paragraph 9 continues:”My fears were in no way allayed when Dr Adoko began sending me harassing emails likening me to ‘Hitler, Amin, and Musolini rolled into one’, and accusing me of fraudulent concealment and perverting the course of justice by refusing to provide a copy of the report.”

29. These harassing emails were copied to Miss Berry and third parties. Paragraph 9 continues: “Dr Adoko’s harassment became so troublesome to me that I felt obliged to complain to the police, after which he agreed not to contact me again.”

So basically, Dr Adoko helped Neelu nurture the early stages of her paranoid delusion that her niece had been mistreated by the hospital where she died. Later this “malpractice” allegation would morph into “murder”, and with the advent of the Hampstead hoax it would be amended to “Satanic ritual abuse and murder”, with side trips into body part harvesting.

On a recent Facebook post, Neelu made an oblique reference to Dr Adoko, whom she sometimes refers to as a father figure:

When she mentions “two late dads…one author of the book The Most Corrupt British Judges“, she’s talking about Dr Adoko, who did write a book by that name: in fact, you can read his own “executive summary” of the book, which sounds…interesting.

Actually, it sounds a lot like some of the arrant nonsense that currently spews forth from Neelu’s mouth. There’s a lot of perverting of justice and remedies sought and that sort of thing, and of course the entire legal system conspired against poor Dr Adoko to deprive him of his rightful place as a lawyer, yadda yadda blah blah.

So while it seems unlikely that Dr Adoko was Neelu’s “dad” in any normal sense of the word, it’s quite possible that she was inspired by Dr Adoko, and so felt a particular closeness to him. As with many of Neelu’s friends and influencers (Sabine and Belinda, we’re looking at you), this seems like a less than wise choice.