Never Again to Babangida!

Thursday
Jul 29th

Babangida's Legal Fixer Arrested

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Officers from Britain's Serious Fraud Office arrested one of Ibrahim Babangida's lawyers, Jeffrey Tesler, 60, at his office in Tottenham, London, in a move that will widen the scope of the international investigation into corrupt payments on Nigeria's $6 billion liquefied natural gas project.  

Tesler, who has already implicated several senior United States, Japanese and Nigerian officials in interviews with France judge instruction Renaud van Ruymbeke, is to be extradited to the USA to face further questioning by the Department of Justice. Tesler, who worked as an agent for the US Halliburton in Nigeria, became a key target for investigators after they discovered more than $180 million in accounts in his name in Monaco and Luxembourg.

Also arrested with Tesler was Wojciech Chodan, who also worked as an agent for Halliburton and wrote detailed diaries describing meetings with the bribe consortium and representatives of international oil companies.

We hear that British officials decided to arrest Tesler when they learned he was planning to travel to Israel (he has dual British/Israeli citizenship).

His lawyer immediately made an application for bail. Tesler¹s arrest follows a deal last September with the US Department of Justice by Halliburton executive Albert Jack Stanley who confessed to coordinating a corrupt payments fund on behalf of Halliburton to secure the Nigerian contract.  Stanley, who was number three in the Halliburton hierarchy, also admitted to stealing $11 mn for himself from the bribe fund.

Stanley's guilty plea states that many of the bribes on behalf of Halliburton were paid when former US Vice President Dick Cheney was chief executive and chairman of the company from 1995-2000. Stanley said that bribes were paid to three Nigerian heads of state and several other senior officials including former oil minister Dan Etete, who is wanted in France on money laundering charges.. And on 11 February, Halliburton subsidiary Kellog Brown & Root pleaded guilty in the US courts to five charges of corruption on the Nigerian project and paid a fine of $402 million and paid a further $177mn to the Securities & Exchange Commission for violating company law.

The Department of Justice says these fines do not rule out further prosecutions of officials from any of the companies involved in the corrupt payments network. A spokesman for Nigeria's Attorney General Michael Aondoakaa said there are no plans for prosecutions on the gas corruption case which has cost the country billions of dollars

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  • Drug Dealer

  • Murderer

  • Anti-Democrat

  • Corrupt to the Bone

Let's face it - we have all always suspected Ibrahim Babangida of being a drug dealer. The story of Gloria Okon, Dele Giwa's death, the burning of the Ministry of Defence and other stories are all allegedly tied to an official drug ring during IBB's regime. We researched the rumors, and this is what we found.

In an authoritative report still posted on the web site of the Canadian Parliament on the drug trade in Africa, Labrouse marks out Ibrahim Babangida, Nigeria's former self-appointed president, as one of the drug-dealing dictators in Africa. Read more

dele giwa

Dele Giwa, a journalist, was allegedly murdered on the 26 of October 1986 by the former military dictator Ibrahim Babaginda - following damning publications. Close observers of the Nigerian media feared then it was the beginning of harsh military dictatorship in the country. It was a true assessment.

Babangida refused to appear before the duly constituted Oputa panel, giving assorted reasons for his refusal. Ray Ekpu, Giwa's colleague, said: Well, the government may say that the killers have not been found but the killers are known. ...Many Nigerians agree that it was a state sponsored terrorism and that he was assassinated by the state. Read More

Nigeria's military dictatorship, led by General Ibrahim Babangida, annulled the Jun 12 presidential election and canceled plans to return the nation to civilian rule. Britain, the United States and France condemned the latest military takeover and threatened to toughen sanctions against NigeriaAbacha urged all Nigerians to forget the June 12 election.

Lagos lawyer, Gani Fawehinmi, however, said: "June 12 is a symbol of our democracy. It was a day Nigeria and Nigerians without any discrimination whatsoever united in voting Chief MKO Abiola in the freest election in the history of election in Nigeria. ... Read More

Most Nigerian leaders have been corrupt, but Ibrahim Babangida added new, historic elements to corruption. One prime example is what he did with the defunct BCCI Bank. BCCI's activities in Nigeria were so profoundly, overwhelmingly corrupt as to suggest a very significant level of corruption in Nigerian officialdom generally.

Whereas BCCI's activities in most countries merely involved corrupting a few, key people, in Nigeria the corruption was systemic and endemic, and touched nearly every operation of the bank in Nigeria. The bank was operated by Babangida and his friends, including a deposed powerful ruler in northern Nigeria. Read More

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