Former minister in corruption probe

– Nigeria’s former oil minister faces charges only at home but her name crops up in a growing number of international cases that lift the lid on the scale of alleged corruption in the country’s oil sector.

Since leaving office in 2015, Diezani Alison-Madueke has been implicated in bribery, fraud, misuse of public funds, and moneylaundering cases in Nigeria, Britain, Italy and the United States.

The first female president of the global oil cartel Opec – who was one of Africa’s most prominent politicians – has always

Lagos

denied the allegations, which involve billions of dollars syphoned from oil deals and state coffers.

But former US State Department Nigeria specialist Matthew Page suggested that a US civil forfeiture case to seize $144 million of assets from allegedly ill-gotten crude contracts may just be the start of her legal troubles.

“Although this is the first attempt by US law enforcement to go after assets allegedly stolen by Diezani and her henchmen, it almost certainly will not be the last,” he told AFP.

Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari, elected in 2015 on a promise to eliminate graft, has said that mind-boggling sums of public money were stolen by previous administrations.

Alison-Madueke served under president Goodluck Jonathan from 2010 to 2015 and was Nigeria’s first female minister of petroleum resources. But her tenure was dogged by scandal.

On her watch, former central bank governor Lamido Sanusi was sacked for claiming the staterun Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) had failed to remit $20 billion. –