Malabu: Jonathan promised ENI officials $50m, Report alleges
…Implicates Sen. Ikechukwu Obiora, others
Our correspondent
When he was Nigeria’s president in 2011, Goodluck Jonathan was said to have promised to give top management of ENI the sum of $50 million as part of the controversial Malabu oil deal.
In a new report by PM News and monitored by The Daily Times, Vincenzo Armanna, a top official of ENI, told investigators on Wednesday that he was informed by a security official for the then Nigerian President, Goodluck Jonathan, that $50 million had been set aside for top ENI management under the deal.
The Daily Times however did not see in the report any confirmation that the said $50 million was released to ENI officials.
It would be recalled that The Daily Times had earlier reported that former Nigerian lawmaker, Senator Ikechukwu Obiora and a few other top Nigerians also benefited from the bribe money which many now see as blood money as it robbed the nation billions of Naira that would have been used to better the lives of citizens of the country.
The latest PM News report stated that Armanna led Eni’s project to acquire the scandal-plagued OPL-245 field in 2011, adding that Armanna is both a defendant and a prosecution witness in the corruption trial.
Nigeria lost over $6 billion in revenue, apart from the $1.1 billion from the sale of OPL-245 field.
The witness is expected to appear as witness today, Thursday, in Milan, Italy. He has also alleged that ENI officials tried to silence him from owning up to his earlier statement on the scandal.
According to the report, prosecutor Fabio De Pasquale said ENI sought to convince Armanna, a former Eni manager, to withdraw some statements he made during investigations into the Nigerian corruption case involving the Italian oil group, a court heard on Wednesday.
“De Pasquale made the comment in a trial hearing into the case, during a legal debate over a request by Eni lawyers to adjourn proceedings to give more time to consider evidence in a related obstruction-of-justice investigation.
“We have become aware that Eni, through its managers, would have tried to influence and would have approached the defendant (Vincenzo) Armanna to convince him to withdraw some of his statements,” De Pasquale told the court without elaborating.
“Eni has denied any wrongdoing in the trial, in which it is accused of buying a Nigerian offshore oilfield licence in the knowledge that most of the $1.3 billion purchase price would be siphoned off to agents and middlemen in corrupt payments.
“Oil major Shell, which jointly bought the offshore field with Eni, is also on trial for corruption over the deal. It too denies any wrongdoing.
Eni also denies any wrongdoing in relation to a separate investigation where prosecutors are looking into allegations that Eni sought to obstruct justice in the Nigeria case.
“Later on Wednesday, the Milan trial court denied Eni’s request for an adjournment, clearing the way for Armanna to take the stand.
However, it ruled that for now he could only be asked about the graft case, not allegations of obstruction of justice.
Eni said in a statement on Wednesday it had declared itself an offended party in the obstruction-of-justice investigation,” the report stated.
Prosecutors have not laid any charges against Eni officials or the group itself in this widening investigation.
“Eni is dealing with the (trial) proceedings with the utmost serenity and is confident that the deliberations underway will continue to confirm the company’s total non-involvement with facts that never happened and have nothing to do with the group,” the company said in a statement,” the report stated.
It would recalled that The Daily Times earlier in the year reported how a new investigation revealed that a former lawmaker, Senator Ikechukwu Obiora, was paid the sum of $11,465,000, an equivalent of N4.127 billion in the Malabu deal.
The Malabu national robbery has been described as Africa’s largest petroleum industry scandal in history.
The source, who made the disclosure to The Daily Times, also told us that Senator Ikechukwu Obiora is to face prosecution in a European country anytime from now over his role in the sleaze,
According to The Daily Times report, the deal involving Malabu oil fraud centres around former Nigerian oil minister, Dan Etete, who, while serving as oil minister, secretly acquired rights to OPL 245 through a shadowy front company called Malabu,
which later laundered over $1 billion as bribe money to some Nigerian officials when the money was supposed to be channelled into the account of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
From the bulk One Billion Dollars, Etete disbursed some millions of Dollars into the private coffers of top government functionaries to ensure that every part of the deal was tightly sealed.
Apart from Senator Ikechukwu Obiora, other top government functionaries at that time who were said to have benefitted from the criminal deal include Nigerian businessman, Aliyu Abubakar, who withdrew $54,418,000 in cash while another $466,065,965.44 was withdrawn in cash was subsequently, funnelled to government officials including then Attorney General, Mohammed Bello Adoke, Minister of Petroleum, Diezani Alison-Madueke, Minister of Defence and former National Security Adviser, Aliyu Gusau.
“The sum of $10,026,280 was alleged to have been paid to former Attorney General, Christopher Adebayo Ojo, while Ikechukwu Obiorah received $11,465,000 payment on the deal,” The Daily Times had reported.
Continuing, The Daily Times report stated that “According to very reliable sources, the deal was kept away from the Nigerian people while money was paid directly into the pockets of senior Nigerian officials. (Etete was later convicted in a Nigerian court on a separate money laundering probe).
According to an Italian investigator, Van Beurden, the Dutch police must have found some dirt in the records their raids obtained.
“There was apparently some loose chatter…particularly the people that we hired from MI6 who, must have said things like, ‘Well, yeah, you know, I wonder who gets a pay-off here and whatever.”
According to him, former British intelligence operatives that Shell hired to help navigate the seedy world of West African oil politicking said the scandal wasn’t just “loose chatter.”
The new investigation revealed that Senior Shell employees openly discussed in email how they knew over $1 billion of their money would go to Etete and others in political kickbacks,
“The company decided to move forward with the deal anyway, denying for years up to this point its employees did anything wrong and claiming it only knew it was paying the Nigerian government.
One email from Shell official, Guy Colegate, to colleagues in March, 2010 sums it up: “Etete can smell the money,” Colegate wrote. “If, at nearly 70 years old he does turn his nose up at 1.2 bill he is completely certifiable…but I think he knows it’s [sic] his for the taking. I don’t think he will push it away,” he wrote.
“That email was forwarded to the then Shell CEO, Peter Voser, one of the world’s most powerful oil executives at the time. No records available show he informed authorities or stood in the way of the deal.
Another Shell advisor, former British intelligence service official, John Copleston, wrote about Etete’s graft plan to senior Shell executives in 2009 as they began laying out various deals for a share of the oil field.
According to him,“(Etete] claims he will only get 40m of the 300m we offering-rest goes in paying people off,” Copleston wrote.
For Shell, the stakes couldn’t have been higher: OPL 245, one of Africa’s most valuable oil fields, contains an estimated nine billion barrels of untapped oil, worth nearly $500 billion even with today’s bargain bin oil prices.
Its eventual purchase boosted the world’s fifth-largest company’s proven reserves by a third (proven reserves are a key statistic for shareholders).
The field has been at the centre of legal battles since 1998, when Etete first acquired rights to it through his front company. Months before it finally sealed the deal in 2011, Shell had to pay $30 million in a separate settlement on bribery charges in Nigeria.
Now, the Anglo-Dutch oil giant was in the lurch once again.
“This dawn raid is, I won’t say premature, but it’s, we were not, we hadn’t concluded our own work,” van Beurden said, referring to an internal Shell investigation. They then mulled whether they should inform the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission of the predawn raid, but opted against it because it would be “share price sensitive.”
It continued: “At this point in time, everything seems to be share price sensitive,” Henry said on the phone, chuckling. Shell has continued to deny wrongdoing in the Malabu business and any knowledge of improper payments to Malabu or other person or authority.
“It is Shell’s position that none of those payments were made with its knowledge,” the company said recently.
On Monday, after Global Witness issued a new report outlining the findings of the leaked documents, a Shell spokesman appeared to walk back that position in an email statement.
“Over time, it became clear to us that Etete was involved in Malabu and that the only way to resolve the impasse through a negotiated settlement was to engage with Etete and Malabu, whether we liked it or not,” the spokesman said.
He added: “We believe that the settlement was a fully legal transaction.” Shell did not dispute the veracity of the leaked documents.
According to the new report, Eni officials also received funds in retrocession (in essence, reimbursement for multiple layers of insurance after a deal goes through).
One, Chief Development — Operations and Technology Officer, Roberto Casula, received $50 million delivered in cash. In Italy, prosecutors have recommended Casula and Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi stand trial in the corruption case.
“The Eni board issued a statement saying they retained “total confidence” in Descalzi. Eni also released a statement saying it was complying with authorities but denied any wrongdoing. Representatives of Voser, Etete, and Jonathan haven’t yet issued any statements about the revelations.
“But a security consultant, Mazi Wilson Chikezie told The Daily Times that it was time President Buhari ends the Malabu matter once and for all by investigating who did what against Nigeria in the transaction.
“Having won the 2019 presidential election, President Buhari does not owe anybody any apology or obligation. He just has to do the needful.
It is only Buhari that can solve the Malabu puzzle and the way out of it is to investigate anybody involved and bring them to book,” the report had stated.
