Jailed former Delta State Governor James Ibori still lives a lavish lifestyle, a prosecutor told a British court yesterday.
Prosecutor Sasha Wass told Southwark Crown Court said despite Ibori’s assets being restrained in 2008, he continued to live a lavish lifestyle, travel and pay fees to the English boarding school where his three children are being educated.
She quoted Ibori as telling a Swiss private bank in 2004 that he owned 30 per cent of oil firm Oando , which paid $1.2 million into his account that year.
The court also heard that PKB Privatbank had in an internal document likened Ibori, who governed oil-producing Delta State from 1999 to 2007 to a scion of the Kennedy dynasty in the United States.
Ibori was jailed for 13 years in Britain after pleading guilty in February last year to 10 counts of fraud and money-laundering worth 50 million pounds ($79.5 million). Prosecutors say his total wealth was likely to be far greater than that.
Details of Ibori’s assets and how he kept them hidden from the public gaze through a web of shell companies and foreign bank accounts are being disclosed as part of a three-week confiscation hearing which began in London on Monday.
One of the biggest embezzlement cases seen in Britain, Ibori’s is also a rare example of a senior Nigerian politician being held to account for the corruption that has held back Africa’s most populous nation and top oil producer.
Wass told the Court that in 2004, Ibori opened an account at Lugano-based PKB in the name of a shell company called Stanhope Investments.
Quoting from internal PKB documents, Wass told the court that Ibori presented himself to the bank as the owner of an insurance company, half of a bank and 30 per cent of Oando.
She said a total of $1.2 million flowed into the PKB account from Oando in three payments that year which had later been channelled to other accounts and were part of funds intended for the purchase of a $20 million private jet.
Shares in Oando, Nigeria’s biggest home-grown oil company, fell by 10 per cent in Lagos yesterday following the first allegation by Wass on Monday that Ibori had hidden assets in the firm.
Oando said on Monday that Ibori had only an “insignificant” holding in the firm and also said it had sold $2.7 million of its foreign exchange earnings for naira in 2004 to a company that later turned out to be controlled by Ibori, but it did not know that at the time.
Combined with Ibori’s track record of hiding his assets, this led to the “irresistible inference” that Ibori had further hidden assets which investigators had not yet uncovered, she said, adding that one option of where these might be was Oando.
Wass also quoted from an internal PKB report from 2004 which said Ibori came from one of a few Nigerian families which had for decades developed the oil industry in that country.
“We could compare these families with the Kennedy dynasty which also mixed business and politics,” the bank document said.
Another excerpt said Ibori was “an extremely rich man as he was doing a lot of business before becoming governor”.
PKB, which is fully owned by the Luxembourg-listed Compagnie de l’Occident pour la Finance et l’Industrie did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the early 1990s, Ibori worked as a cashier at Wickes, a home improvement chainstore in London. He was convicted of theft in 1991 after being caught taking money from the till. A property he and his wife bought in a London suburb was repossessed as the couple could not meet mortgage payments.
During his time as governor, however, he amassed a property portfolio worth at least $6.9 million as well as a fleet of luxury cars, including a Bentley and a Maybach 62.
