Former military Head of State, Muhammadu Buhari, who served Abacha as Executive Chairman of the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF) has come under some embarrassment over his comments in 2008 that Abacha never stole as new Abacha loot has been traced.
Buhari, in 2007, described the allegations of looting against Abacha as “baseless”, because according to him, “ten years after Abacha, those allegations remain unproven because of lack of facts”.
However, fresh facts emerged that the previous estimate of what Abacha stole which stood at $5 Billion may be wrong.
A competent source close to the Special Investigation Panel (SIP), whose office is in the presidency told journalists that about four different meetings between the SIP team headed by a retired senior military officer and a Switzerland-based lawyer, Enrico Monfrini, hired by the Federal Government to assist in the recovery of the Abacha loot in foreign jurisdictions, had taken place outside the country in the last eight months.
Monfrini is an Attorney-at-Law, Monfrini Grettol & Associés, Geneva, Switzerland. The source, who preferred to be anonymous because of the sensitive nature of the subject, said: “In the course of the recent meetings between the Nigerian team and authorities in about four other jurisdictions as well as the team from the foreign legal firm, it was discovered that a lot of underhand dealings must have taken place in the recovery of the Abacha loot.
“This was largely responsible for the under-declaration of what has been recovered so far by three successive governments and worse still what is still trapped in offshore accounts.” Some of the foreign jurisdictions, where the stolen funds had been traced to include Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
One of the latest discoveries includes a $550 million in a coded account in France. “It has been very difficult to get details out into the public domain so far because the latest process is being secretly coordinated by the retired senior military officer heading the SIP in the presidency and the Attorney General of the federation, who provides legal advice for the team,” the source added. The Federal Government was said to have been encouraged to dig deeper into the Abacha loot because of a recent statement credited to the Swiss lawyer, Monfrini, handling the case.
Only the administration of former President Olusegun Obasanjo has been able to record the highest amount of $1.25 billion from the Abacha loot. The preceding regime of General Abdulsalami Abubakar and the succeeding government of the late President Umar Musa Yar’Adua could not do much in this regard notwithstanding the efforts also made. Obasanjo recently gave an indication that much could still be trapped outside the country when he declared, at a function in Delta State: “When I was president, I called the World Bank.
I said, please, give me the list of the amount that has been stolen, where it is kept and who the beneficiaries are. I never got anything from the World Bank thereafter. We have on our own decided that we will investigate and get from one family, Abacha family alone. “From the Abacha family alone, we recovered millions of dollars. I got 1.25 billion dollars and the lawyer in Switzerland (he is still there), who was doing it for us, said, when I was leaving, that if we worked harder, there was still, at least, one billion dollars that we can get from that family alone.”
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