Nigeria ex-minister faces graft charges

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 money laundering cases in Nigeria, Britain, Italy and the United States.

The first female president of the global oil body Opec — who was one of Africa’s most prominent politicians — has always denied the allegations, which involve billions of dollars siphoned from oil deals and state coffers.

Seizing assets

But former US State Department Nigeria specialist Matthew Page suggested that a US civil forfeiture case to seize $144 million (Dh529 million; 124 million euros) of assets from allegedly ill-gotten crude contracts may just be the start of Alison-Madueke’s 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.

Officials in Abuja say they are talking with US prosecutors about repatriating the money if the civil forfeiture claim is successful.

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.