President Muhammadu Buhari scandalised the OPL 245 transaction between Malabu Oil & Gas Ltd, Shell and Eni because he had a personal agenda, Mohammed Bello Adoke, former attorney-general of the federation (AGF), has alleged in a new tell-all book to be unveiled in Abuja on Thursday.
The book, titled ‘OPL 245: The Inside Story of the $1.3bn
Nigerian Oil Block’, was published by The Conrad Press Ltd in the United
Kingdom.
Adoke also accused former Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo,
Abubakar Malami, former AGF, some lawyers as well as some local and foreign
NGOs of pursuing personal interests in the long-running court cases which
started in 2015 after President Goodluck Jonathan left office.
Oil Prospecting Lease No 245 was awarded to Malabu in 1998
by the Sani Abacha regime but it became a subject of global corruption
investigations, criminal prosecution and civil cases across the world after the
Nigerian company sold its entire interest for $1.1 billion to Shell and Eni in
2011. The oil companies also paid $210 million as signature bonus to the
federation.
Local and international NGOs alleged that the $1.1 billion
paid to Malabu was a concealed bribe to Nigerian politicians who facilitated
the transaction.
Buhari filed criminal charges against Adoke, who was the
attorney-general when the oil block was bought by Shell and Eni.
Italian prosecutors also charged Shell, Eni, Dan Etete, the
former Nigerian petroleum minister who fronted the Malabu deal, and other
officials to court in Milan, while Nigeria sought $1.7 billion compensation
from JP Morgan Bank in the UK over the transfer of proceeds from the sale of
OPL 245.
However, the courts in Italy, the UK and Nigeria concluded
that there was no evidence of corruption and no proof that Nigeria was
short-changed in the deal, while US department of justice, the US Securities
and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Dutch authorities dropped their
investigations after finding nothing incriminating.
Adoke was discharged and acquitted in the related charges
filed before two federal high courts in Abuja.
‘THE GRAND
CONSPIRACY’
In the new book, which he said he published in order to
bring the saga to a closure after being arrested, detained and charged to court
by the Buhari administration and vindicated by the courts home and abroad,
Adoke wrote: “Everyone had personal agenda.”
The former minister of justice said: “There were those
fighting for ‘Mohammed Sani’ (Abacha) to get a cut from the Malabu windfall.
They were not really interested in whether or not Nigeria was cheated in the
OPL 245 deal as long as the Abachas would be compensated. There were those
fighting to benefit from fees and commission if Nigeria successfully won legal
claims against Shell and Eni. There were those fighting to win more trophies
and more grants for exposing ‘the biggest corporate bribery scandal in
history’. It was a cruel coalition of gold diggers, glory hunters and
avengers.”
He alleged that at the very top, “President Buhari wanted to
exact a pound of flesh for my failure to help ‘Mohammed Sani’ get a share of
the payments to Malabu. His second-in-command, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, wanted to
prove to his boss that he was a genius who could use litigation to make Shell and
Eni cough out billions of dollars as compensation to Nigeria over the
‘corrupt’ OPL 245 deal.
“Osinbajo, who was the de facto Attorney-General of the
Federation in the first six months of the Buhari Administration, set
up and chaired the Presidential Committee on Asset Recovery
(PCAR) with a reported revenue target of over US$5.5bn. He could not trust
anyone else to lead the mission.
“Down the food chain was Osinbajo’s lawyer friend, Olabode
Johnson, whose firm and partners were targeting a commission of between 5% and
35% from the expected recovery.
“Also firmly in the food chain was Mr. Abubakar Malami, who
was appointed Attorney-General by Buhari in November 2015. He had a natural
agenda: he was one of the lawyers who worked for ‘Mohammed Sani’ on the Malabu
dispute in the early 2000s. He had enough incentive to make the Office of the
Attorney-General of the Federation available to rubbish me. He had not just
Buhari, his principal, to please but also had Abacha, his client and friend, to
help.
“I don’t know where to place the local and international
anti-corruption campaigners, led by UK-based Global Witness, on the ladder, but
I know they were hunting for a trophy to showcase to their funders that they
were working hard for the money. They initially did not pin anything on me:
they were more interested in how a former minister of petroleum
got an oil block. But they upgraded their agenda along the
way. What they did to me amounted to an abuse of platform and privilege: they
galvanized their global networks to promote a false, narrow, shallow and libelous
narrative against me, dodging the truth and embellishing the facts to arrive at
their predetermined destination.
“Global Witness and their comrades in arms enlisted Mr.
Fabio De Pasquale, Italian prosecutor and petty bully, to take up the OPL 245
case and prosecute the oil companies and their executives in the Court of
Milan. His own agenda was hidden in plain sight: he had been laboring all his
life to bring down the former Italian Prime Minister, the late Silvio
Berlusconi, who had links to Eni. He did not think twice when Global Witness
recruited him to do the dirty job on OPL 245.”
‘HATCHED IN ABUJA’
Adoke wrote that the “grand conspiracy” against him was
hatched in Abuja in 2015.
“According to what I was told several years later by
insiders who I cannot name for confidentiality reasons, De Pasquale and other
Italian prosecutors came to Nigeria in the third quarter of 2015 to hold a
series of meetings with government officials. They met with Osinbajo, the late
Mr. Abba Kyari, Chief of Staff to the President, and EFCC officials. De
Pasquale gave them assurances that he had enough evidence to nail the oil
companies and individuals involved in the OPL 245 deal, but he needed Nigeria
to do its part in making things easy for the prosecution,” he wrote.
“Although everybody’s agenda was different, there was a
common goal: to criminalize the Resolution Agreements. The core strategy was to
assail the integrity of the entire OPL 245 transaction between Malabu, Shell
and Eni, starting with the Resolution Agreements which provided the foundation
for the deal. Charges had to be filed against me to help the looming
international corruption trial in Italy. The prosecutors would then be able to
argue at the trial that the deal was a product of corruption and that the
Attorney-General who issued the legal advice on its execution had been charged
with fraud, money laundering and abuse of office.
“The operation would be choreographed and coordinated by the
EFCC, in conjunction with anti-corruption campaigners and the media – both
local and international. As I was further told by Presidency insiders, De
Pasquale said Nigeria should apply to be joined as an injured party in the
Italian trial. It was also decided that the government would file separate
proceedings against JP Morgan Chase Bank in the U.K. and claim compensation of
US$1.7bn for its ‘negligence’ in ‘illegally’ transferring US$801m to Malabu
from the US$1.3bn paid by Shell and Eni.
“In addition to the US$1.7bn claim against JP Morgan,
Nigeria was to file a civil case against Shell and Eni in the U.K to claim back
the $1.1bn paid for the benefit of Malabu. I still don’t know how the
Osinbajo-led PCAR arrived at the figure of ‘recovering’ US$5.5bn through
litigation. It was all fantasy, but freedom of dreaming is a fundamental human
right.
“Ultimately, everything would depend on how well the
government was able to criminalize the Resolution Agreements. To flesh out the
De Pasquale-inspired scheme, a strategy session was held by top government
officials at the Presidential Villa in November 2015. They set out a
multipronged strategy: the EFCC would take care of the criminalization; HEDA
Resource Centre, a Nigerian NGO working in partnership with Global Witness,
would handle the ‘advocacy’; [and the online media] would execute the character
assassination.”
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