Nigeria's anti-corruption agency is reviving a five-year-old scandal
involving one of Africa's richest oil blocs, in which a former petroleum
minister and his allies allegedly made $1.1 billion dollars and the
state oil company $210 million.
The Economic and Financial
Crimes Commission filed suit Tuesday in the federal high court charging
former petroleum minister Dan Etete, former justice minister Mohammed
Bello Adoke and businessman Aliyu Abubakar with fraud and money
laundering of hundreds of millions of dollars in the sale of the bloc.
The money came from a Nigerian escrow account at the London branch of
JPMorgan Chase, according to the court document.
The story of the Malabu OPL 245
oil bloc already is being investigated in the United States, Britain,
Italy and France. The accusations are typical of the corruption that has
impoverished Nigeria, which has the continent's biggest economy and
second-largest oil production.
Separately, Nigeria's legislature is
investigating why the state got so little of the proceeds of a deal
brokered by Bello Adoke in 2011 to resolve an ownership dispute
involving British-Dutch oil multinational Shell, Italian Eni, Etete's
Malabu Oil, Abubakar's Rocky Top Resources and Nigeria's state oil
company.
Earlier this year, Italian
prosecutors raided the headquarters of Shell in The Hague and Eni in
Milan. Global Witness, the corruption watchdog that has long pursued the
case, said that "Shell and Eni have always denied knowledge of the
corruption at the heart of this deal ... exposed their investors to
massive risks and have been tainted by this theft from Nigerian
citizens."
Etete could not be reached for
comment Wednesday on the latest court challenge, though he and the
others involved have declared their innocence.
Malabu Oil paid $20 million for
OPL 245 in 1998 under a contract awarded by Etete, who was then
petroleum minister in the regime of military dictator Sani Abacha. The
bloc is said to hold 9 billion barrels of crude and an unquantifiable
amount of natural gas.
When civilian rule came in 1999, the government of Olusegun Obasanjo seized the bloc and invited multinationals to bid on it.
Ten years later, to end a
protracted legal battle preventing exploration of Nigeria's most
valuable oil bloc, Bello Adoke, then justice minister and attorney
general, brokered a deal by which Shell and Eni paid $1.1 billion to
Malabu and $210 million to Nigeria for an exploration license.
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