Trouble Looms For Jonathan, Diezani As US Court Grants Buhari’s Govt Demand To Access Their Banks Statements

Nigeria’s request to summon 10 banks in the US regarding access to account statements of some of Nigeria’s former top public officeholders has been granted by a New York judge, Law360 understands.

The granting of the subpoena is consequent upon a September 2019 judgement of a UK court that awarded $9.6 billion against Nigeria in favour of Process and Industrial Developments Ltd (P&ID).

Bloomberg reported that, as part of its effort to upturn the $9.6 billion arbitration award,  the federal government filed an application before the US court.

The crux of the application, according to Bloomberg, was to seek permission to subpoena information on transactions involving top government officials, including former President Goodluck Jonathan and his wife, Patience; former ministers of petroleum, Diezani Alison-Madueke and Rilwanu Lukman.

P&ID’s spokesperson described the request for a subpoena as “a desperate attempt to substantiate Nigeria’s spurious allegations of fraud”.

Ruling on the application on Thursday, Lorna Schofield, the judge, averred that Nigeria’s request met the standards of the law.

But the court objected to Nigeria’s request to hide its findings from P&ID.

The judge ordered that Nigeria must grant P&ID access to the documents received from the subpoena.

The banks involved are: Citibank, N.A. (Citibank), Allied Irish Banks plc (Allied Irish), HSBC Bank USA (HSBC), Standard New York, Inc. (Standard New York), Deutsche Bank Trust Co. Americas (Deutsche Bank), J.P. Morgan Chase (JPMorgan), United Bank for Africa (UBA), Bank of Cyprus, Fortis Private Banking Singapore Limited (Fortis), and Standard Chartered International (USA) Ltd. (Standard Chartered).

The Nigerian government said the 10 banks are “likely to have processed US dollar transactions connected to P&ID’s operations as either correspondent banks or the New York branches of foreign lenders”.

The former president, under whose administration the intractable agreement began, had said he has no foreign bank accounts.

According to Abubakar Malami, attorney-general of the federation, “there is good reason to believe that ministers at the highest level were involved in a corrupt scheme to steal money from Nigeria”.

He said P&ID had no ability or intention of ever performing the contract, which required the company to build a gas processing plant and the government to supply gas.

He said P&ID paid kickbacks to government officials so that they could overlook the company’s lack of technical capabilities in executing the contract which was never started.

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is prosecuting James Nolan, Adam Quinn (at large), and two firms in which they are said to be directors – Goidel Resources Limited, and ICIL Limited on 32 counts of fraud — linked to the P&ID case.