More than £20m of embezzled funds, hidden in Jersey bank accounts during the corrupt regime of the late Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha, have been returned to the Nigerian government.
The attorney general of Nigeria, Mohammed Bello Adoke, led a delegation to Jerseyin August to negotiate the release of the funds, which were the proceeds of corrupt vehicle deals.
The cash was confiscated from fraudster Raj Bhojwani, a businessman now serving a six-year jail sentence for laundering US$43.9 million through his Jersey bank accounts.
Abacha’s regime was synonymous with corruption. During his five-year rule as president of Nigeria, between seizing power after cancelling elections and his death in a suspected poisoning in 1998, he looted an estimated £2.2 billion from the country’s coffers.
An article in The Nation, a Nigerian newspaper, recently claimed that there was a further $400 million stashed away in Jersey that should also be recovered.
In June 2004 the then Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo, came to Jersey to thank the Jersey authorities for their investigations into money laundering by Nigerian officials, and for the return of £73.25 million to Nigeria in previously uncovered looted cash.
Jersey’s attorney general, Tim Le Cocq, said that it was a pleasure to help a country that had suffered so much through corruption, and underlined his department’s commitment to seizing the proceeds of crime and returning them to their rightful owners wherever possible.
At Bhojwani’s sentencing in June 2010, Crown advocate Matthew Jowitt said that the millions laundered by Bhojwani was money that the cash-starved West African nation could not afford to lose.
Le Cocq did not say whether there was more money held in Jersey that would be returned to Nigeria.
The article in The Nation quoted an unnamed source claiming that Le Cocq had offered to help to find and return that money. And last week Nigeria’s attorney general praised Jersey’s record of co-operation over the looted money.
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