Tag: Abacha

The Federal Government will seek for the repatriation of over $550million and £95,910 in 10 accounts and six investment portfolios linked to the Abachas in France, Britain, British Virgin Islands and the United States, Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Mr. Mohammed Bello Adoke, said yesterday.

He said the government is in support of the forfeiture proceedings initiated by the United States Department of Justice against the property related to the corrupt conduct of the late General Sani Abacha, a former Head of State.

Adoke in a statement in Abuja, against the backdrop of the forfeiture proceedings against the Abachas and their cronies.

Following the freezing of over $550m looted funds by the late Gen. Abacha, the United States wrote the Federal Government for assistance to serve forfeiture notice on the son of the former dictator, Mohammed Abacha, an associate of the ex-ruler, Abubakar Atiku Bagudu, and Dumez Nigeria Plc.

The AGF’s statement said the government would use the repatriated loot to fund projects for the benefit of the people, in accordance with the dictates of Chapter IV of the United Nations Convention against corruption (UNCAC).

The statement added: “The Federal Government of Nigeria welcomes the forfeiture proceedings initiated by the United States Department of Justice against the property related to the corrupt conduct of the late General Sani Abacha, a former Head of State of Nigeria, and his associates and the subsequent laundering of corruption proceeds.

“The proceedings will make it possible for the defendants to forfeit over $550million and £95,910 in 10 accounts and six investment portfolios linked to the Abachas in France, the Great Britain, British Virgin Islands and the United States.

“We applaud the efforts of the United States to recover the proceeds of corruption for the benefit of the people of Nigeria.

“As the Central Authority for the Federal Republic of Nigeria, my office has received requests for Mutual Legal Assistance for the Central Authority of the United States and we are cooperating with the United States in line with the obligations we assumed under the Treaty on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters.

“The overall objective of these efforts is to ensure that Nigeria as the Victim State is able to have the forfeited assets (money) repatriated to Nigeria to fund development projects for the benefit of the people in accordance with the dictates of Chapter IV of the United Nations Convention against corruption (UNCAC).

“Let me assure you that Nigeria as State Party to UNCAC will do all that is required to realise this objective.

The US Department of Justice letter had contained a breakdown of some of the accounts and investment firms/ banks where the looted funds were stashed abroad.

The highlights are as follows: Doraville Properties Corporation – $287 million in Account Number 80020796 located at Deutsche Bank International Limited in the Bailiwick of Jersey; HSBC Fund Administration (Jersey) – $12 million in account number S-104460 in the Bailiwick of Jersey; and Rayville International, S. A – $1 million in account number 223405880IUSD at Banque SBA in Paris, France.

Others are Standard Alliance Financial Services Limited – $144 million in account 223406510PUSD at Banque SBA in Paris; Mecosta Securities – $21.7 million in accounts 10030688 and 100138409 at Standard Bank in the United Kingdom; and HSBC Bank Plc – $1.6 million in account number 38175076;.

Also in the list are Blue Holding (1) Pte Ltd/ Ridley Group Limited – £6,806,900; Blue Holding (2) Pte. Ltd/ Ridley Group Limited – £21,846,983; Blue Holding (1) Pte. Ltd/ Ridley Group Limited – £10,293,343.58; Blue Holding (2) Pte. Ltd/Ridley Group Limited – £56,962,996.26

In the letter to the Federal Government by the Associate Director, Criminal Division of the Office of International Affairs of the US Department of Justice, Jeffrey M. Olson, the US government said it sought the help of Nigeria in line with January 14, 2003 Treaty on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters between the two nations.

The United States Government has given more insights into the looting of over $2billion from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) by a former Head of State, the late Gen. Sani Abacha, and some of his children.

The US said Abacha secured 60 false security votes letters to draw money from the CBN.

More than $700million of the money was delivered to Mohammed Abacha in bags or boxes full of cash.

Some of the cash transferred from the CBN, under the guise of security votes, to foreign accounts included $1.1billion and £413 million (GBP) in cash; $50,465,450; £3,500,000 GBP in traveller’s cheques; and $386, 290, 169

In a document filed by the United States Department in the District and Bankruptcy Courts for the District of Columbia, the US court document, which was exclusively obtained by our correspondent, said in part: “Abacha together with Mohammed Sani Abacha, Bagudu and others, systematically embezzled public funds worth billions of dollars from the CBN on the pretext that the funds were necessary for national security.

“After causing the CBN to release the funds, often in cash, Gen. Abacha and Bagudu then moved the funds overseas, including through US financial institutions (the Security Votes Fraud).

“Over 60 false security votes letters were addressed to and endorsed by Gen. Abacha, each of which resulted in the withdrawal of Nigeria’s public funds from the CBN.

“Subsequently, the funds were deposited into accounts controlled by, or used to purchase assets for the benefit of, Gen. Abacha, Bagudu or other members of the conspiracy.”

The document quoted samples of some of the false security votes letters raised by a former National Security Adviser, Aliyu Ismaila Gwarzo.

The document said: “By letter, dated June 2, 1994, Gwarzo falsely stated: “In view of the ongoing negative campaign against this country, a small international operation has been mounted to cover it. Please approve as a matter of urgency, the sum of $5million for this operation

“By letter dated November 30, 1994, Gwarzo falsely stated:$100m requested to combat an economy that was deflected and distorted through the black market.

“By letter, dated August 20, 1996, Gwarzo falsely stated: “In light of the current political situation in the country, coupled with the increase in security operations, there is need for a lot of funds to handle the challenges outlined above such that I require N350million plus $30million and 15million pounds. Please consider the desperate need and approve.

“Each of these letters and others like them were endorsed by Gen. Abacha.”

The document also gave insights into how the embezzled funds were looted from the CBN and transferred out of the country through United States.

The document added: “Shortly after Gen. Abacha’s death, the government of Nigeria established a Special Investigation Panel(SIP), which found that Gen. Abacha and his co-conspirators had used false security votes letters to steal and defraud more than $2billion in public funds, including: (1) at least $1.1billion and £ 413 million (GBP) in cash(2) at least $50,465,450 and £ 3,500,000 GBP in traveller’s cheques; and (3) at least $386, 290, 169 through wire transfers.

“The conspirators transported the proceeds of the Security Votes Fraud out of Nigeria to accounts in Europe that were under the conspirators’ private control, including the Rayville and Standard Alliance accounts at Banque SBA, the Eagle Alliance and Mecosta accounts at ANZ (London) and the Mecosta account at Standard Bank as described below.

“The CBN staff and other individuals known and unknown to the United States generally would deliver the currency stolen with the security votes letters to Gwarzo at his residence.

“Gwarzo and others acting at his discretion would repackage the currency in secure bags and then deliver it to Gen. Abacha at his residence in Abuja, Nigeria.

“Gen. Abacha or those acting at his direction, delivered more than $700million of these funds to Mohammed Abacha in bags or boxes full of cash.

“Mohammed Abacha gave the cash he received to Bagudu, who later arranged for the money to be transferred to accounts controlled by Bagudu and Mohammed Abacha in foreign countries.

“Transfers included deposits into accounts in the name of defendants Mecosta, Doraville, Standard Alliance, and Rayville, as well as Eagle Alliance and Harbour Engineering.

“In order to move the money overseas, Bagudu deposited the cash proceeds of the Security Votes Fraud into at least one of two Nigerian commercial banks, Union Bank of Nigeria and/ or Inland Bank of Nigeria.”

Bagudu referred to the money deposited into Union Bank and Inland Bank as his “cash swaps.”

“Bagudu and/or Mohammed Abacha then instructed Union Bank or Inland Bank to transfer the stolen funds to other accounts under Bagudu or Mohammed Abacha’s control, such as accounts in the name of Mecosta, Rayville and Eagle Alliance.

“Inland Bank or Union Bank made the necessary arrangements to transfer the money overseas. The funds were transferred from Union Bank or Inland Bank back to the CBN to an account held by Union Bank or Inland Bank at the CBN.

“The CBN then transferred the funds from the account of Union Bank or Inland Bank to their respective overseas domiciliary accounts held at banks in either London or New York.

“The specific London or New York account varied depending on which Nigerian commercial bank had been used in the first instance.

“Through these “cash swaps,” at least $137million was transported into and out of the United States, and into accounts held in the name of the defendant corporations.”

The document listed 16 accounts and assets to be forfeited by Gen. Abacha and his associates.

The Department of Justice added: “On November 18, 2013, the prosecutor filed a forfeiture action in the U.S District Court for the District of Columbia seeking to forfeit the proceeds of money laundering and corruption offences related to the investigation of General Abacha and his associates.

“The properties sought to be forfeited by U.S. authorities include the following assets (collectively, the Defendant Properties):

•All assets held in account number 80020796, in the name of Doraville Properties Corporation, located at Deutsche Bank International Limited in the Bailwick of Jersey, and all interests, benefits, or assets traceable thereto;

•All assets held in account number S-104460, in the name of Mohammed Sani, at HSBC Fund Administration (Jersey) Limited in the Bailwick of Jersey, and all interest benefits, or assets traceable thereto;

•All assets held in account number 223405880IUSD, in the name of Rayville International, S.A, at Banque SBA in Paris, France and all interest benefits or assets traceable thereto;

•All assets held in account number 223406510PUSD, in the name of Standard Alliance Financial Services Limited located at Banque SBA in Paris, France and all interest benefits, or assets traceable thereto;

•All assets held in account numbers 10030688 and 100138409, in the name of Mecosta Securities, at Standard Bank in the United Kingdom, and all interests, benefits or assets traceable thereto;

•All assets held in HSBC Life (Europe) formerly held in account number 37060762 in the name of Mohammed Sani at Midland Life International Limited, and all interests, benefits or asset traceable thereto;

•All assets in account number 38175076, in the name of Mohammed Sani, at HSBC Bank Plc, and all interests, benefits or assets traceable thereto;

•All assets held in the name of Blue Holding (1) Pte. Ltd., on behalf of or traceable to Ridley Group Limited and/or the Ridley Trust, at J.O Hambro Investment Management Limited in the United Kingdom and all interests, benefits, or assets traceable thereto;

•All assets held in the name of Blue Holding (2) Pte. Ltd., on behalf of or traceable to Ridley Group Limited and/or the Ridley Trust, at J.O Hambro Investment Management Limited in the United Kingdom and all interests, benefits or assets traceable thereto;

•All assets held in the name of Blue Holding (1) Pte. Ltd., on behalf of or traceable to Ridley Group Limited and/or the Ridley Trust, at James Hambro and Partners LLP, in the United Kingdom, and all interests, benefits or assets traceable thereto;

•All assets held in the name of Blue Holding (2) Pte. Ltd., on behalf of or traceable to Ridley Group Limited and/or the Ridley Trust, at James Hambro and Partners LLP, in the United Kingdom and all interests, benefits or assets traceable thereto;

•Doraville Properties Corporation, a corporate entity registered in the British Virgin Islands, together with all its assets and all property traceable thereto;

•Mecosta Securities, Inc., a corporate entity registered in the British Virgin Islands, together with all its assets and all property traceable thereto;

•Rayville International, S.A, a corporate entity registered in the British Virgin Islands, together with all its assets and all property traceable thereto;

•Ridley Group Limited, a corporate entity registered in the British Virgin Islands, together with all its assets and all property traceable thereto; and

•Standard Alliance Financial Services Limited, a corporate entity registered in the British Virgin Islands, together with all its assets and all property traceable thereto;

“Following the filing of the Verified Complaints, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued sixteen warrants of arrest in rem, ordering the restraint of each of the Defendant Properties.

“The prosecutor has sought the enforcement of the warrants of arrest in rem in France, Jersey, British Virgin Islands and the United Kingdom.

“The prosecutor is now required to provide notice of the U.S. forfeiture proceedings to Mohammed Sani Abacha, Abubakar Atiku Bagudu and Dumez Nigeria Plc.

“Additionally, in order to enforce the warrants of arrest in rem for property located in the United Kingdom, the prosecutor must provide record of the U.K proceedings to Mohammed Sani Abacha and Abubakar Atiku Bagudu.”

The Guardian of London reports that the Eko Atlantic city holds a lot of promises despite the concerns being raised by some environmentalists.

It’s a sight to behold. Just off Lagos, Nigeria’s coast, an artificial island is emerging from the sea. A foundation, built of sand dredged from the ocean floor, stretches over ten kilometres. Promotional videos depict what is to come: a city of soaring buildings, housing for 250,000 people, and a central boulevard to match Paris’ Champs-Élysées and New York’s Fifth Avenue. Privately constructed, it will also be privately administered and supplied with electricity, water, mass transit, sewage and security. It is the “future Hong Kong of Africa,” anticipates Nigeria’s World Bank director.

Welcome to Eko Atlantic, a city whose “whole purpose”, its developers say, is to “arrest the ocean’s encroachment.” Like many low-lying coastal African countries, Nigeria has been hit hard by a rising sea-level, which has regularly washed away thousands of peoples’ homes. To defend against the coastal erosion and flooding, the city is being surrounded by the “Great Wall of Lagos”, a sea defence barrier made of 100,000 five-ton concrete blocks. Eko Atlantic will be a “sustainable city, clean and energy efficient with minimal carbon emissions,” offer jobs, prosperity and new land for Nigerians, and serve as a bulwark in the fight against the impacts of climate change.

At least that’s the official story. Other facts suggest this gleaming city will be a menacing allure to most. In congested Lagos, Africa’s largest city, there is little employment and millions work and scavenge in a vast, desperate informal economy. Sixty percent of Nigeria’s population – almost 100 of 170 million people – live on less than a dollar a day. Preventable diseases are widespread; electricity and clean water hard to come by. A few kilometres down the Lagos shoreline, Nigerians eke out an existence in the aquatic slum of Makoko, built precariously on stilts over the ocean. Casting them as crime-ridden, the government regularly dismantles such slums, bulldozing homes and evicting thousands. These are hardly the people who will scoop up square footage in Eko Atlantic’s pricy new high-rises.

Those behind the project – a pair of politically connected Lebanese brothers who run a financial empire called the Chagoury Group, and a slew of African and international banks – give a picture of who will be catered to. Gilbert Chaougry was a close advisor to the notorious Nigerian dictatorship of the mid 1990s, helping the ultra-corrupt general Sani Abacha as he looted billions from public coffers. Abacha killed hundreds of demonstrators and executed environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who rose to fame protesting the despoiling of the country by Shell and other multinational oil corporations. Thus it’s fitting for whom the first 15-story office tower in Eko Atlantic is being built: a British oil and gas trading company. The city proposing to head off environmental devastation will be populated by those most responsible for it in the first place.

The real inspiration for Eko Atlantic comes not from these men but the dreamworlds of rampant capitalism, stoked by a successful, thirty year global campaign to claw back gains in social security and unchain corporations from regulation – what we now know as neoliberalism. In Nigeria, oil wealth plundered by a military elite spawned extreme inequalities and upended the economy. Under the IMF’s neoliberal dictates, the situation worsened: education and healthcare were gutted, industries privatized, and farmers ruined by western products dumped on their markets. The World Bank celebrated Nigeria; extreme poverty doubled. The most notorious application of the power of the Nigerian state for the interest of the rich came in 1990: an entire district of Lagos – 300,000 homes – was razed to clear the way for high-end real-estate development.

As elites in Nigeria and elsewhere have embraced such inequality as the very engine of growth, they have revived some of the most extreme forms of colonial segregation and gated leisure. Today, boutiques cannot open fast enough to serve the Nigerian millionaires buying luxury cars and yachts they’ll be able to dock in Eko Atlantic’s down-town marina. Meanwhile, thousands of people who live in communities along the coast expect the new city will bring displacement, not prosperity, says environmental activist Nnimmo Bassey. To get their way, the developers, backed by industry and politicians, have trampled over the country’s environmental assessment process. “Building Eko Atlantic is contrary to anything one would want to do if one took seriously climate change and resource depletion,” he says.

The wealthy and powerful may in fact take climate change seriously: not as a demand to modify their behaviour or question the fossil-fuel driven global economy that has made it possible, but as the biggest opportunity yet to realise their dreams of unfettered accumulation and consumption. The disaster capitalists behind Eko Atlantic have seized on climate change to push through pro-corporate plans to build a city of their dreams, an architectural insult to the daily circumstances of ordinary Nigerians. The criminalised poor abandoned outside their walls may once have served as sufficient justification for their flight and fortification – but now they have the very real threat of climate change as well.

Eko Atlantic is where you can begin to see a possible future – a vision of privatised green enclaves for the ultra rich ringed by slums lacking water or electricity, in which a surplus population scramble for depleting resources and shelter to fend off the coming floods and storms. Protected by guards, guns, and an insurmountable gully – real estate prices – the rich will shield themselves from the rising tides of poverty and a sea that is literally rising. A world in which the rich and powerful exploit the global ecological crisis to widen and entrench already extreme inequalities and seal themselves off from its impacts – this is climate apartheid.

Prepare for the elite, like never before, to use climate change to transform neighbourhoods, cities, even entire nations into heavily fortified islands. Already, around the world, from Afghanistan to Arizona, China to Cairo, and in mushrooming mega-cities much like Lagos, those able are moving to areas where they can live better and often more greenly – with better transport and renewable technologies, green buildings and ecological services. In Sao Paulo, Brazil, the super-rich – ferried above the congested city by a fleet of hundreds of helicopters – have disembedded themselves from urban life, attempting to escape from a common fate.

In places like Eko Atlantic the escape, a moral and social secession of the rich from those in their country, will be complete. This essentially utopian drive – to consume rapaciously and endlessly and to reject any semblance of collective impulse and concern – is simply incompatible with human survival. But at the moment when we must confront an economy and ideology pushing the planet’s life-support systems to breaking point, this is what the neoliberal imagination offers us: a grotesque monument to the ultra-rich flight from responsibility.

 

Nigeria is asking the World Bank to help force Liechtenstein to return more than a quarter billion dollars stolen by former military dictator the late Sani Abacha.

A statement from Liechtenstein’s government yesterday blamed the delay on a complaint filed by Abacha-linked companies at the European Court of Human Rights. The statement says Liechtenstein is negotiating with the World Bank to ensure the country isn’t held liable if that court rules in favour of the companies.

Reports quoted Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as accusing the small European nation of “outrageous delaying tactics” because of its banks benefit. She spoke after meeting World Bank officials in Washington.

Nigeria asked Liechtenstein to return the money in 2000, two years after Gen Abacha died. A Liechtenstein court ordered the money confiscated last year.