This is perhaps the beginning of long travails for the immediate past Minister of Petroleum, Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke. After being arrested on Friday and taken to the Charing Cross Police station in London where she was booked, interrogated and later granted bail, her international passport was seized so as to prevent her from leaving the UK.
While this was going on, heavily armed EFCC operatives had invaded the former minister’s mansion at Frederick Chiluba Street, Asokoro, Abuja. They stormed the house in three white Hilux trucks and two Hilux buses. Two of the trucks were unmarked while one belonged to the Nigerian Police. The EFCC operatives cordoned off the house and did not allow vehicles to stop in front of the duplex. Some were inside the premises and others were outside.
Simultaneously as they also stormed the home of Jide Omokore, one of her visible business allies while oil minister. Omokore owns SPOG and Atlantic Energy . He was said to be involved in multi-billion dollar oil deals, including kerosene scam that dented Nigeria’s treasury by over $6billion. He was famous for throwing a lavish wedding for his son in Dubai, for ‘a chicken change’ of several millions of dollars.
Omokore’s 9 Turnbull Street home in Ikoyi was raided by EFCC operatives. His office on Glover Street, also in Ikoyi was also under Lockdown by EFCC officials. One source even said, Omokore’s wife locked herself inside one of the rooms at Turnbull, hiding from the operatives.
Nigeria’s former governor of Central bank, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, now the Emir of Kano cried out about an unremitted $20 billion into the treasury, but all he got for his whistle-blowing were abuses and the termination of his appointment, few months to the end of his tenure.
Part of the anomalies Sanusi pointed out before he was sacked by Jonathan was confirmed by the PWC auditors when they looked into NNPC books and unearthed a 2011 Strategic Partnership Agreements, involving Omokore’s Atlantic Energy and kola Aluko’s Seven Energy.
In 2011, as part of the efforts to promote local content, Shell sold its shares in 5 oil fields where NNPC was the majority shareholder. Shell had been the operator of these oil wells but NNPC awarded the operator rights to its subsidiary NPDC , that is, it allowed Shell to sell its shares but not the rights to operate them as it previously did.
NPDC then signed an ‘agreement’ worth almost $7bn with Seven Energy(Kola Aluko) (3 fields) and Atlantic Energy(Jide Omokore) (2 fields) for them to operate the fields. These companies of course had no clue how to operate the oil fields – Atlantic was registered as a company the day before it signed the agreement – so of course they sub-contracted the work to other companies. Seven Energy’s contract entitled it to 10% of the profits from the 3 fields while Atlantic was entitled to 30% of profits in its 2 fields.
Sanusi’s complaint was that these two companies were pointless and were just collecting money that should have accrued to Nigeria. The two companies also did not pay any taxes or royalties whatsoever to Nigeria.
Governor Adams Oshiomhole had disclosed that US authorities revealed that a former minister in Mr. Jonathan’s administration had stolen as much as $6 billion. Even though Mr. Oshiomhole had not mentioned the name of the former minister, there were speculations that the reference was to Mrs. Alison-Madueke, a former Shell BP executive who became a power unto herself during her ministerial tenure.
President Buhari recently in the United States while meeting with President Xi of China said his government was ready to prosecute all those who stole Nigeria’s oil money.
