The Nigerian government is locked in a court battle with Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) over control of €180 million (£150 million) that was stashed abroad by Nigeria’s former Head of State, late Gen. Sani Abacha.
By Tuesday’s official exchange rate of the British Pounds Sterling at N563, as seen on the website of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the money in contention is about N84.5 billion.
The United Kingdom’s The Telegraph reported that the case was again poised to spark fresh questions about dirty money flowing through the City of London.
In the latest legal tussle over the money, generally known in Nigeria as “Abacha loot”, the report stated that Nigeria wanted the crime-fighting agency, NCA, to release funds that it froze at the request of US authorities.
In May 2020, the federal government confirmed the receipt of $311 million looted by a late dictator, Abacha, repatriated from the United States and Island of Jersey.
According to Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, “The amount increased significantly from over $308 million to over $311 million because of the interest that accrued from February 3, 2020, to 28th April, 2020, when the fund was transferred to the CBN.”
It came after the recovery of $322 million from Switzerland in 2018.
At the time, Malami noted that the government had committed that the asset would support and assist in expediting the construction of three major infrastructure projects across Nigeria, namely, Lagos – Ibadan Expressway, Abuja – Kano Road, and Second Niger Bridge.
It was estimated that from 2007 to 2020, about $1.5 billion had been returned to Nigeria from different parts of the world.
According to the latest report, American prosecutors said the money could be traced back to a suspected $2.2 billion (£1.6 billion) or more that was plundered by Abacha and his associates during the dictator’s five-year reign.
In the complex issues surrounding the repatriation of the funds, the authorities in the US sought to return the money to “the people of Nigeria”, under the so-called Kleptocracy Initiative.
But the Nigerian government was said have sought to “sidestep” the process and obtain the funds directly through an application to the High Court, in a move opposed by UK and US authorities, documents seen by The Telegraph and SourceMaterial showed.
Although Abacha died more than 20 years ago, the piles of treasure he looted from Nigerian coffers have kept cropping up, with at least $2 billion being thought to have stolen during his five years in power.
The former dictator’s spoils have been linked to dozens of offshore bank accounts over the years, as investigators unravel the intricate web he and his associates spun across the globe.
British and American authorities have been locked in talks over tens of millions of pounds of cash that investigators say can be traced to Abacha’s plundering, the investigation found.
The case, which involves a serving Nigerian politician who was one of Abacha’s top henchmen, includes cash in British bank accounts that has been frozen by the National Crime Agency.
However, the Nigerian government has brought its own legal action against the NCA in a bid to end the tussle, it has emerged.
The report stated, “It is a complicated story with many twists and turns. But the on-going struggle for ‘Abacha’s loot’ reveals the difficulty in recovering stolen funds, the frustrations of law enforcement, and the way people accused of corruption have relied on respectable law firms to argue their cases in court.”
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