Nigeria Recovering 300 Million Dollars from Corrupt General’s Foreign Account

OE Watch Commentary: Even for a country that has gained a notorious reputation for corruption, the amount Sani Abacha, the Nigerian general who also served as de facto president for five years in the 1990’s, looted from the national coffers is considered immense, estimated at five billion dollars and perhaps higher. Now, as the accompanying excerpted article from the Nigerian newspaper Vanguard explains, $322,510,000 of that money has been returned to the country by Switzerland. Additional funds stashed away in foreign bank accounts by Abacha, who died in 1998, have already been returned, are in the process of being returned, or are still being searched for by international investigators.

As a breaking news story the article only says the funds have been recovered; it does not describe how Abacha came to acquire such a large amount of money. For that, it is necessary to review other publications, which reveal more of the story, including that Abacha was once dubbed one of the most corrupt leaders in history by Transparency International. While poverty is widespread in the country, there is enormous wealth from the oil industry that has been prone to be siphoned off by some of the country’s elites, including Abacha. Besides living a lavish lifestyle in numerous sprawling homes, he is believed to have stashed over two billion dollars in European banks. Some of the money was also laundered through the purchase of US government backed bonds. Later the FBI would help recover over 400 million dollars from bank accounts in several countries.

Apparently corruption was a family affair as his son, Abba, was charged by a Swiss court with money laundering, fraud, and forgery in 2005. He would spend 561 days in custody for his crimes. Because some members of the family have been accused of stealing and hiding vast sums of money, interestingly, Abacha and the names of several of his relatives have often been falsely used in the infamous advance fee scam known as a 419, so-called after the Nigerian Criminal Code section that deals with fraud. Unwary individuals have sent untold sums of money to con artists in an attempt to claim some of the hidden loot.

There is perhaps a certain irony in the story of Sani Abacha. While notoriously corrupt, and rising to power through a series of successful coups, Abacha greatly improved the Nigerian economy, including taming inflation, reducing the foreign debt, and increasing foreign reserves. There are those in Nigeria who still honor him for his economic accomplishments. However, the accompanying article serves as a reminder that while helping the country, he also helped himself. End OE Watch Commentary (Feldman)