20091204

The conviction in a Swiss Court on 19 November of Abba Abacha, son of former military leader General Sani Abacha, for participating in a criminal organisation together with the confiscation of US$350 million in assets stolen from Nigeria provide important clues to the corruption linked to the $6 billion Bonny Island gas scheme, according to legal experts in Geneva.

Swiss investigators showed how Abacha family members and their advisors set up front companies and channelled hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen state funds through established Western banks including Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, with few questions asked. Gen. Abacha's Lebanese financial advisor Gilbert Chagoury and the Swiss-Israeli banker Gabriel Katri used their sway with international institutions to open accounts for the Abacha brothers using false names.

Detectives say several corporate entities used by the Abacha family to plunder state assets from 1993-1998 also featured in the bribery scheme run by the United States' Halliburton to distribute millions of dollars to individuals and companies working on the Bonny gas project. In January 2009, Halliburton paid $560 mn. in fines to the US Justice Department and the US Securities and Exchange Commission as part of a plea bargain over its Nigerian operations.

The Justice Department investigation continues with a focus on companies and individuals - such as British lawyer Jeffrey Tesler and Halliburton official Wojciech Chodan - involved in the bribe scheme. The US is trying to extradite both men to help the probe (AC Vol 50 No 5). British, French, Italian and Nigerian teams are all investigating the deals. US lawyer Jack Blum, who represents the Nigerian government in its efforts to obtain legal assistance from the US government, doubts the criminal case in Nigeria will be launched before 2012.

Investigators from Britain's Serious Fraud Office working on the Bonny Island case have requested copies of the Abba Abacha prosecution notes and details of the Abacha family's financial networks (see diagram). The money trail should lead to even bigger sums of stolen assets, especially those diverted from Bonny Island through over-priced procurement contracts and massive under-invoicing on gas exports, a Geneva-based legal expert told Africa Confidential.

More than $1.5 bn. is likely to have been illegally diverted from the gas project by company officials and senior representatives of successive regimes in Nigeria, the expert added. 'The real black box would contain much bigger contract commissions and extremely high intermediation fees on the gas export contracts.'

On 19 November, the Geneva court also convicted Katri, currently domiciled in Monaco, for assisting Abacha's criminal endeavours. Katri, who advised Kenya's President Daniel arap Moi, Nigeria's Gen. Ibrahim Babangida and several Middle Eastern leaders on their finances, has not informed the court whether he intends to appeal. Katri, who had been working as an external manager for Union Bancaire Privée, opened an account in the name of the Nigerian company Allied Network Ltd., whose beneficiaries were falsely declared as 'Mohammed Sani' and 'Abba Sani', when they were in fact Mohammed and Abba Abacha.

allafrica