Still on Abacha’s loot

Next tomorrow being Wednesday May 25, 2014, Nigeria would receive the sum of $227 million (Euro 167 million) out of billions of funds looted by former military Head of State, late General Sani Abacha. This was confirmed last week by Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. The fund is coming after a 16-year legal battle to retrieve the stolen money from Liechtenstein.
“We can confirm that Nigeria will on June 25, 2014, receive the sum of euro 167 million from the government of the Principality of Liechtenstein, part of looted funds recovered from the Abacha family,” the ministry said in a statement.
The finance ministry had said it was seeking to repatriate 185 million euros ($252 million) of stolen funds. It was not immediately clear if it would repatriate 18 million later on.
Also last week, the federal government dropped the court case against Abacha’s son, Mohammed, as part of a deal to recover the money and, in turn, the family agreed to drop its human rights suit.
For many years, federal government’s efforts to get the money back had been stymied by a lawsuit from companies linked to Abacha’s family, alleging infringement of their rights to a fair trial.
But conservative estimate of the amount stolen by the late dictator between 1993 and 1998, when he was the maximum ruler of Nigeria was put at $5 billion by the Transparency International.
Further investigations however indicates that the amount of dollars stashed away in foreign bank accounts may far exceed the already established $5 billion, as a Special Investigation Panel, SIP, tracing what has now become ‘Abacha loot,’ is reported to have stumbled on fresh clues indicating that the stolen funds still trapped in offshore accounts stand at over N3.2 trillion.
In the course of the recent meetings between the Nigerian team and authorities in about four other jurisdictions as well as the team from the foreign legal firm, Monfrini Grettol & Associés of Geneva, Switzerland, it was discovered that a lot of underhand dealings must have taken place in the recovery of the Abacha loot and this was largely responsible for the under-declaration of what has been recovered so far by three successive governments and worse still, what is still trapped in offshore accounts, which, in the estimation of the investigators stands at $210 billion.
Some of the foreign jurisdictions, where the stolen funds had been traced to are Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
It will be recalled that civil action was initiated by the Federal Republic of Nigeria before the High Court of London in May 1999, which resulted in the seizing of only USD 60 million in the United Kingdom.
Only the administration of former President Olusegun Obasanjo, was able to record the highest recovered amount of $1.25 billion from the Abacha loot. The former regime of General Abdulsalami Abubakar and the succeeding government of the late President Umar Musa Yar’Adua could not do much. Obasanjo recently gave an indication that much could still be trapped outside the country, when he declared, at a function in Delta State: “When I was president, I called the World Bank. I said, please, give me the list of the amount that has been stolen, where it is kept and who the beneficiaries are. I never got anything from the World Bank thereafter. We have on our own decided that we will investigate and get from one family, Abacha family alone. “From the Abacha family alone, we recovered millions of dollars. I got 1.25 billion dollars and the lawyer in Switzerland (he is still there), who was doing it for us, said, when I was leaving, that if we worked harder, there was still, at least, one billion dollars that we can get from that family alone.”
Before Obasanjo took office from General Abubakar in 1999, Abubakar’s government delivered a clear message to Nigerians that Abacha looted huge sums, and they had to be restored. Members of the Abacha family and some of their accomplices then voluntarily returned approximately $1 billion to the Federal Government.
In 2002, the Obasanjo administration had an agreement with the Abacha family to return another $1 billion out of the $1.1 billion that had been identified, traced and frozen, with the quid pro quo that the Abachas would be allowed to keep balance that had been assessed not to be of criminal origin. The arrangement was not well received by the masses.
Although the proposal caused a massive outcry for seeming to reward the theft of public funds, it was subsequently rejected by the late Head of State’s son, Mohammed Abacha, who continued to maintain that all the assets in question were legitimately acquired. The highest sum that had in the past been traced to the family ranged from $3 billion to $5 billion, which includes money allegedly derived from misappropriation of funds from the Central Bank of Nigeria, bribes received from multi-nationals, among others.
The Swiss government last December said, that it has so far returned to Nigeria the sum of $700 million stolen by the late dictator and deposited in several Swiss banks. The Swiss ambassador to Nigeria, Dr. Hans-Rudolf Hodel, announced the figure at a media briefing in Abuja.
While the latest discovery of the volume of stolen funds still trapped outside the country may appear as an indication of a breakthrough in the renewed effort to recover the looted funds, the sad news is, however, that Nigeria may never get the money back through the legal means it has been following since 1999.
The issue of Abacha loot is another sore note to our national history- a situation where leaders entrusted with political power, rather than use it for public good; turn round to build skyscrapers of wealth for themselves, family members and generations unborn through massive looting of public treasury. The trend runs through generations of leaders in Nigeria, past and present.
Even now, we cannot say corruption does not live among us. Revelations at the ongoing probe of activities of various ministries, departments and agencies of government are as chilling as they are baffling, particularly for a nation that made anti-corruption its swan-song.
The fact remains that corruption in public and private lives has become a societal norm. The uncleanliness and uncertainty of our social and political system unfortunately compel people, who find themselves in key positions of trust to devise unorthodox means of safeguarding their future and those of their unborn succeeding generations. Even the local societies condone corruption by obliging chieftaincy titles to opportunistic men and women of means.
And on the matter under discussion, my advice to the federal government is to seek diplomatic solution to resolving the issue of outstanding funds in foreign accounts as court cases may not bring the desired result.