Defamation: Minister Threatens Legal Action Against PMAN

The Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, has threatened legal action against the Performing Musicians Employers Association of Nigeria (PMAN) of accusing him of plagiarism and intellectual property theft.
PMAN had alleged that Alhaji Lai Mohammed’s creative summit on financing the creative industry which he recently hosted is part of a proposal by PMAN submitted to the minister on the 5th of August, 2016, but which Alhaji  Mohammed went ahead to implement without consulting with PMAN.
Counsel to PMAN, Ifeanyi Ejiofor, had in a statement said that, “though the conference was deceptively tagged “Creative Industry Financing Conference”, it is our client’s firm’s belief that the conference was held in full implementation of our client’s original brain child and ideas as clearly highlighted in their respective presentation of 5th August, 2016 and action plan of 18th August, 2016 all in the possession of the Ministry of Information and Culture.
“Our client viewed this action as a great infringement of their intellectual property rights and dubious conversion of their brain child ideas and concept, originating from painstaking professional study, research and investigation that gulped them over 500,000”.
Best the minister dismissed the allegation as laughable and threatened to sue  PMAN for defamation of character, stressing that it was his right to host a conference of the creative industry. “As a minister for information and culture I can’t stop people coming to me with proposals, so when a supposedly reputable organization as PMAN comes and says he wants to see the minister and he says we want to organize conference on creative industry, does that stop me as a minister from organizing my own creative industry, especially when you did not come to me with a blue print to show me how the conference will be?”
Even is PMAN proposal was visible, there was no way at that  point in time that I could have asked them to go ahead to do it, but where is the law that says that the minister must accept any or every proposal from a group, so your right to organize a conference is exclusive to one person or a person comes to you and say because he has given you a proposal that he wants to organize a creative conference, so you as a minister, you are stopped or you can’t do your work”?, but I can assure you, I have  instructed my  lawyers to sue them for defamation”, he said.