Buhari Traces Looted Funds to UK, Switzerland, Others

The Federal Government has started tracing looted Nigerian funds to foreign nations with the aim of recovering and repatriating them.

This move came on the heels of the declaration by President Muhammadu Buhari on his first day in Aso Villa office that he inherited an almost empty treasury from his predecessor, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, thus vowing that his administration would recover all the looted funds stashed in foreign banks by corrupt Nigerians. The FG is now specifically targeting the United States, the United
Kingdom, France, Switzerland and other European jurisdictions where it believes corrupt officials have been stashing public funds.

“The next three months may be hard, but billions of dollars can be recovered, and we will do our best,” the President was quoted as saying in a statement signed by his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Mr. Femi Adesina.

Some of the countries where looted funds from Nigeria have been kept in the past include Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Others are France, Germany, British Virgin Islands and other tax havens spread across the globe.

Adesina, who confirmed the move in an exclusive interview with Saturday PUNCH on Thursday, said, the search for the looted funds will not be limited to these countries but anywhere in the world where they may be hidden.

And that the Federal Government is planning to engage the services of foreign private investigators to help trace and find looted funds belonging to the people of Nigeria.

“Everything that needs to be done to get all those funds repatriated will be done, including engaging private investigators,” the Presidential spokesperson added.

Adesina said the identification of foreign banks being used to stash stolen funds was one of the mandates given to Buhari during a meeting he had with President Barak Obama at the recent G-7 summit in Germany. He said,

“When the President met with the G7, the promise that the American President gave him was that Nigeria should just provide all the facts, the figures, the statistics, including the banks. He promised that if Nigeria could make the information available, then the US will help in recovering the stolen funds.”

When asked specifically if the Federal Government had started identifying the banks, the presidential spokesman said:

“Yes. In fact, the President said the government will spend the next three months identifying banks, individuals and monies that have been ferried out of this country.
“The assurance the President has given is that within the next three months, we have to concentrate on getting those monies back to the government coffers,” he added.

Saturday PUNCH learnt that the Federal Government may also go after property owned by public fund looters in London, Dubai, US, Saudi Arabia and other choice international real estate markets where Nigerians are known to be some of the biggest buyers.

It was also learnt that the Department for International Development, a UK government department responsible for administering overseas aid, had alerted the President on over N1.3tn stolen during the last administration, where it is kept and who the beneficiaries are.

This money, a source close to the DFID said, is a low hanging fruit that the President can pluck during his first six months in the office with the help of the UK, US, and other G7 members without hassle.

“This was one of the agreement reached between President Buhari and the G7 countries when the former attended their meeting in Germany,” the DFID source told Saturday PUNCH.

The US in March 2014 had ordered a freeze on $458m in assets stolen by the late Head of State, Gen. Sani Abacha, and his accomplices. Abacha died in office in 1998.

The US Justice Department named two bank accounts in the Bailiwick of Jersey and two other accounts in France as depositories of $313m and $145m Abacha loot respectively. Four other investment portfolios and three bank accounts in Britain were also frozen, with an estimated value of at least $100m.

The US also named nine financial institutions – Citibank, Chase Manhattan Bank and Morgan Guaranty Trust Company, now JPMorgan Chase, and New York-based units of Britain’s Barclays Bank and Germany’s Commerz bank – as places where some of the Abacha loots were laundered.

Similarly, the Crown Prosecution Service in the United Kingdom had estimated former governor of Delta State, James Onanefe Ibori’s loot stolen to be around $250m.

Ibori, who is serving jail term for corruption charges in a UK prison, was said to have bought six property in London, including a six-bedroom house with indoor pool in Hampstead for £2.2m and a flat opposite the nearby Abbey Road recording studios. There was also a property in Dorset, a £3.2m mansion in South Africa and further real estate in Nigeria.

He also owned a fleet of armoured Range Rovers costing £600,000, a £120,000 Bentley, a £300,000 Mercedes Maybach, and a private jet for £12m.

President Buhari said the last administration mismanaged the economy while stating that it was a disgrace that state governments in the country can’t pay salaries; hence, the need to recover looted funds wherever they may be hidden.