James Ibori, the former governor of Delta State, was convicted for 13 years in the UK for fraud and money laundering in 2012. He has returned to Nigeria since his release and has been hobnobbing with President Bola Tinubu, himself with a stench of corruption hovering around him.
Ibori’s dalliance with the courts in the UK is not over because, as stated in the current edition of Private Eye magazine: It has taken more than a decade for investigators and lawyers, now housed in the National Crime Agency’s international corruption unit, to track down Ibori’s stolen money, leading last month to a judge at Southwark crown court making a confiscation order of £102m.
Ibori faces an eight-year jail term if he fails to pay up on the order. But enforcement will surely prove difficult as made clear by Private Eye: As the Ibori and other cases show, getting hold of the money is far from easy. Previous action against him has netted £4.2m for Nigeria, where Ibori is now to be found living under a new president, Bola Tinubu. Should Ibori not cough up the nine-figure sum the UK courts have asked for, extraditing him to serve the eight-year sentence that would ensue might not be simple.
The magazine also lamented about the likelihood that Ibori’s British facilitators will escape prosecution: Conspicuous among the enablers of his crimes were British banks led by HSBC and Barclays, the latter accepting millions of pounds in cash from Ibori’s mistress and others, in wads often running in tens of thousands of pounds at a time. The magazine added: there’s no sign of the banks that facilitated Ibori’s looting (HSBC reported half-year profits of £17bn last week) chipping in to atone for their financial sins.
