Former Delta State governor, James Ibori, currently serving 13 years improsonment in London told a Swiss private bank
in 2004 that he owned 30 percent of oil firm Oando, which paid $1.2 million into
his account that year, a prosecutor told a British court on
Tuesday.
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| Jailed ex-gov James ibori |
The court also heard that PKB Privatbank
had in an internal document likened Ibori, who governed oil-producing Delta
State from 1999 to 2007 and influenced national Nigerian politics, to a scion of
the Kennedy dynasty in the United States.
Ibori was jailed for 13 years in Britain
after pleading guilty in February 2012 to 10 counts of fraud and
money-laundering worth 50 million pounds ($79.5 million). Prosecutors say his
total wealth was likely to be far greater than that.
Details of Ibori's assets and how he kept
them hidden from the public gaze through a web of shell companies and foreign
bank accounts are being disclosed as part of a three-week confiscation hearing
which began in London on Monday.
One of the biggest embezzlement cases seen
in Britain, Ibori's is also a rare example of a senior Nigerian politician being
held to account for the corruption that has held back Africa's most populous
nation and top oil producer.
Prosecutor Sasha Wass told Southwark Crown
Court on Tuesday that in 2004, Ibori had opened an account at Lugano-based PKB
in the name of a shell company called Stanhope Investments.
Quoting from internal PKB documents, Wass
told the court that Ibori had presented himself to the bank as the owner of an
insurance company, half of a bank and 30 percent of Oando.
She said that a total of $1.2 million
flowed into the PKB account from Oando in three payments that year which had
later been channelled to other accounts and were part of funds intended for the
purchase of a $20 million private jet.
Shares in Oando, Nigeria's biggest
home-grown oil company, fell by 10 percent in Lagos on Tuesday following the
first allegation by Wass on Monday that Ibori had hidden assets in the
firm.
KENNEDYS
Oando said on Monday that Ibori had only
an "insignificant" holding in the firm and also said it had sold $2.7 million of
its foreign exchange earnings for
naira in 2004 to a company that had later turned out to be controlled by Ibori,
but it did not know that at the time.
Wass told the court on Tuesday that
despite his assets being restrained in 2008, Ibori had after that date continued
to live a lavish lifestyle, travel and pay fees to the English boarding school
where his three children were being educated.
Combined with Ibori's track record of
hiding his assets, this led to the "irresistible inference" that Ibori had
further hidden assets which investigators had not yet uncovered, she said,
adding that one option of where these might be was Oando.
Wass also quoted from an internal PKB
report from 2004 which said Ibori came from one of a few Nigerian families which
had for decades developed the oil industry in that country.
"We could compare these families with the
Kennedy dynasty which also mixed business and politics," the bank
document said.
Another excerpt said Ibori was "an
extremely rich man as he was doing a lot of business before becoming
governor".
PKB, which is fully owned by the
Luxembourg-listed Compagnie de l'Occident pour la Finance et l'Industrie COFK.LU
did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the early 1990s Ibori worked as a
cashier at Wickes, a home improvement chainstore in London. He was convicted of
theft in 1991 after being caught taking money from the till. A property he and
his wife had bought in a London suburb was repossessed as the couple could not
meet mortgage payments.
During his time as governor, however, he
amassed a property portfolio worth at least $6.9 million as well as a fleet of
luxury cars including a Bentley and a Maybach 62.
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