A wild goose chase

By Musikilu Mojeed

May 23, 2009 10:44PMT
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The Presidential panel headed by the Inspector-General of Police, Mike Okiro, set up to fish out Nigerians involved in the infamous $180 million Halliburton bribery scam is off at a tangent; and official claims that the culprits will be brought to book next month is looking now more like a message of mass deception, findings by NEXT on Sunday has indicated.

On Tuesday, May 12, in the first media briefing into his two-year presidency, Mr. Umaru Yar’ Adua told journalists in Abuja that “I will give you all assurance that it (the investigation) will be pursued to its logical conclusion… (and we will) identify those Nigerians who are involved and make (them) public and prosecute them.”

Four Obstacles:

However, as NEXT on Sunday investigations in Abuja reveal, four major obstacles, stand between the panel and the prospect of diligently prosecuting the investigation that the president has staked his honour to bring to a quick end. These obstacles include the level of seriousness among panelists; the unwillingness to follow obvious leads; as well as the reluctance to invite companies, and presumed sacred cows that have already been indicted in the case locally and abroad. “In all likelihood, the panel has to ask for more time, to save its own face and that of the president” said a top police officer at the weekend.

Worried observers of the investigation confided in NEXT last weekend that members of the panel do not even appear to take the assignment seriously. Rather than personally attend the panel’s sittings, they simply delegated staff in their offices to stand in for them.

Mr. Ahmadu Ali, who is a Commissioner of Police at the Special Investigations Panel, SIP, police headquarters, is now presiding over the panel on behalf of Mr. Okiro. The Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, Farida Waziri, is being represented by the head of the Economic Governance Unit of the EFCC, Mr. Umar Sanda. Other members of the panels have also sent in their subordinates to represent them on the committee.

The Federal Government gave the panel eight weeks to complete its assignment. The panel is now well into it’s fifth week. Knowledgeable insiders in Louis Edet House, where the panel seats in Garki, Abuja, moan in frustration that nothing much has been achieved. But preying on the public ignorance on the matter, as well as on the deep anger of citizens, the committee recently triggered a muffled but intensive publicity in the media designed to convey the impression that its work is well apace, and that it is on a significant track.

Nevertheless, none of the four key companies (see box) involved in the bribery scandal have been invited till date to face the panel. A JGC official, the Japanese arm of the TSKJ consortium told NEXT on Sunday in Lagos, Friday, that it had not received any invitation from the panel. The three other companies, according to a source close to the panel, have not been invited too.

To get up to speed on the investigation, the panel would have invited and sought guidance from two key actors who have epitomised the investigations up till this point: Ibrahim Magu, former head of the Economic Governance Unit of the EFCC, and Mr. Chudi Ofodile, a former chairman of the House Committee on Public Complaints who probed the TSKJ scam and wrote an interim report in 2004.

Both men have not been invited and Mr. Magu’s fate even hangs on a loose leash. On account of his investigations on some former governors and some key actors in the TSKJ scam, Mr. Magu was sent on an indefinite suspension last August. A police panel tried him for what is generally perceived to be a witch hunt, found nothing to incriminate him, but still kept him in the cold, for doing a dutiful anti-corruption job for his country.

Caught in a maze:

To worsen matters, however, the panel has triggered a rash of arrests followed by a publicity blitz suggesting that it has identified $150,000,000 of the bribe money seating in a Swiss account belong to a former Air Force General, AVM Abdullah Dominic Bello.

Mr. Bello, who was Chief of Air Staff in the 1980-83 period under President Shehu Shagari, and was also Chief Executive of the defunct Nigerian Airways, is presumed to be the owner of the Tristar account through which Mr. Jeffery Tesler, the chief mastermind of the bribery scandal, distributed all the bribe. The panel believes that Abdullahi Bello has a strong and long standing relationship with Mr. Tesler and Tristar.

While Mr. Tesler had always claimed that he was the sole owner of Tristar, American investigators hold the view that Bello might be the real owner of Tristar. The US Security and Exchange Commission said it was in possession of Tristar’s corporate and bank account opening documents suggesting that shares in Tristar were held by nominees for the benefit of Bello.

It is this allegation against him that the Okiro panel wanted Mr. Bello to explain. At the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) in Abuja, a 1998 registered entity domiciled in Kaduna announces itself as Tri-Star but has no reference to Bello as any of the two promoters, except if they act as clones or fronts for him. Yet, the Tristar that Tesler used to funnel his bribe to the high brow Nigerian officials, way back to 1995, was registered in Gibraltar.

By arresting Mr. Bello, however, the panel opened a new pathway in the investigation that offers it the convenience to ignore the central characters in the scandal.

American investigators have long determined that three former presidents; Obasanjo, Abacha and Abubakar, as well as a who’s who of Nigeria’s political and business elite received millions of dollars in bribes from American and European contractors retained to build the Nigerian liquefied natural gas plant in Bonny, Rivers State.

Also enmeshed in the vast bribery scheme is an endless train of bureaucrats, top politicians, state and local officials and Dan Etete, former oil minister in the administration of the late General Sani Abacha. In all, the Nigerian bribe takers accepted about ₦27 billion in bribes and while the American authorities are busy pursuing their own citizens and corporations, in connection with the scandal, Nigerian law enforcement authorities have in reality done little to pursue those indicted in this scandal.

Besides Bello, the panel also arrested Ibrahim Aliyu, a former secretary to the Niger State government, former Chairman of the Nigerian Industrial Development Bank, NIDB, and head of the transition team of Abdulsalam Abubakar that ushered in the Obasanjo administration into office in 1999. It is unclear what the Okiro panel really wanted from Mr. Aliyu whose arrest, attorneys from the law offices of Paul Usoro, a senior advocate of Nigeria averred in court documents to secure his freedom, that no charges where put before him prior to arrest, making him look like a high priced lead. Even when the court asked that Mr. Aliyu be released, the panel kept him on for half a week before letting him go on health grounds. Mr. Aliyu treats a prostrate case, according to his lawyers.

However, US investigators had always wished to get a sense of Mr. Aliyu’s connection to Mr. Tesler and the Tristar accounts. A theory was to explore whether he could be a reliable lead to Mr. Abdulsalam, and indeed establish if he was the bagman of the former head of state. In April 2008, the US investigators pressed their curiosity through a letter they sent to the EFCC, asking the agency’s help, through the international cooperation agreement between them, to help clear this foggy area of the scandal.

What the American Saw:

The US request letter laid bare some leads: for instance, it claims that companies associated with Mr. Aliyu received huge monies from Tristar following the signing of the second contract between Tristar and TSKJ in March 1999.

Between May 1999 and July 2000, the report also claimed, Tesler wired $7,108,675 to an account in the name of Sherwood Petroleum Limited at Barclays Bank in Guernsey, The Channel Islands. Another $2.5million was transferred to an account belonging to Urban Shelter Limited at Baring Brothers Bank in Geneva, Switzerland on January 16, 2001 according to the claims of the letter.

This account, owned and controlled by Mr. Aliyu, in turn transferred funds to an account in the name of Satellite Properties Limited, which the Americans claimed was also owned and controlled by Mr. Aliyu.

On January 8, 2002, Tristar again wired $3million to an account in the name of Intercellular Nigeria Limited at Paine Webber, a securities brokerage firm in the US, and on July 8, 2003, the company sent another $2.2million to an account in the name of Fairford Investment Group Limited at Baring Brothers in Geneva. Mr. Aliyu owned and controlled these accounts. The Sherwood Petroleum account, in turn, transferred over $4million to accounts in the name of Mr. Aliyu, Urban Shelter and Satellite Properties.

Mr. Tesler’s attorneys, NEXT on Sunday learnt, have attempted to justify some of the transfers. They claimed that the transfer of $2.2million from Tristar to Fairford Investment was for the acquisition of 20 million shares of stock in Intercellullar on behalf of “clients” of Tesler. They also claimed that the $2.5million sent to Urban Shelter was a deposit towards the purchase of an office complex in Abuja.

Okiro’s Tristar puzzles

Mr. Tesler had claimed that Tristar invested between $5 million to $6 million in Intercellular, acquired commercial real estate in Abuja worth $3 to $4 million, invested more than $10 million in Malabu Oil and Gas, owned by former Petroleum Minister, Dan Etete, and has interests in oilfield development blocks 242, 245 and 256 which were bought off Sherwood petroleum. Are these issues related to the core LNG corruption scandal or a new and perhaps related case?

Now the Okiro panel has less than a month to resolve these entanglements. It remains unclear, as insiders to the investigations revealed last week, how, arresting people who had had dealings with Jeffrey Tesler in the past but who may have little or nothing with the Halliburton LNG Train case, is going to address the concerns of the nation and the promise its president has offered.

Additional reports by Elor Nkereuwem and Idris Akinbajo