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5 nigeria officials face bribe charges Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/breaking_news/7774019.htmhttp://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/breaking_news/7774019.htm
Posted on Fri, Jan. 23, 2004
5 Ex-Nigeria Officials Face Bribe Charges
DULUE MBACHU
Associated Press
LAGOS, Nigeria - Three former Nigerian Cabinet ministers and two other former government officials face charges of accepting part of more than $1 million in bribes from a French electronics giant.
The accusations arose after British officials at London's Heathrow airport in September stopped a Nigerian man carrying a briefcase stuffed with $200,000. His interrogation was initially on suspicion of terrorism, but instead, his cash-filled bag sparked the highest-profile graft case yet in Africa's most populous nation - a country notorious for rife corruption.
Among other international payoff investigations linked to Nigeria: In Paris, a French judge has reportedly warned that Vice President Dick Cheney could be charged over allegations that his former company, Halliburton, paid $180 million in bribes to build a Nigerian gas plant. Halliburton has denied the accusations, and Cheney's spokesmen have refused to comment on the case.
Corruption has persisted despite promises by Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, who won election in 1999 after 15 years of brutal - and rankly corrupt - military rule in this oil-rich nation of more than 120 million people.
Obasanjo pledged to cure the "cancer" of graft, but there have been no significant convictions, and no senior-level arrests and trials until now, in the president's second term.
"If he had started with such trials in his first term, the perception of Nigeria would have changed" regarding corruption, said Ishola Williams, a respected retired general who represents Transparency International, the Berlin-based corruption watchdog, in Nigeria.
Many Nigerians hope the graft case against former Labor Minister Husseini Akwanga, former internal affairs ministers Sunday Afolabi and Mahmud Shata, and two other ex-officials is a sign the government is finally cracking down as promised.
But any trial is off to a slow start: After pleading innocent in December, the five appeared in court Friday only to have judges postpone the case to Feb. 25 because the docket was overcrowded.
The former officials are accused of taking from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars each, allegedly payoffs from France's SAGEM SA to secure a $214 million contract with the Nigerian national identity card program in 2001.
Akwanga was the only one of the five officials still in office at the time the SAGEM scandal broke. He was fired just before his arrest.
Authorities also are holding civil servant Chris Agidi, arrested at Heathrow as he allegedly took the payoffs abroad for deposit in foreign banks. They have not charged him.
In Paris, SAGEM spokeswoman Veronique Faivre declined comment.
In Nigeria, Information Minister Chukwuemeka Chikelu told The Associated Press that the case "demonstrates the resolve of the government that there is no hiding place for corruption in Nigeria."
Nigeria also is following the French probe into allegations that a consortium involving Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root paid about $180 million to win a contract to build the $4 billion-plus Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas plant in the mid-1990s.
Cheney was head of Halliburton for five of the seven years during which the secret payments were allegedly made.
French daily Le Figaro reported last month that Judge Renaud Van Ruymbeke had warned the Justice Ministry in a confidential memo that embezzlement charges ultimately could be filed against Cheney. But he added that it was too early to say whether this was likely, Le Figaro said.
Other allegations are abundant:
_Nigerian prosecutors also have been investigating a disclosure by Halliburton that an official of Kellogg Brown & Root allegedly paid $2.4 million to a Nigerian official in 2001 in return for lower taxes.
_In October, U.S. oil and gas drilling company Baker Hughes agreed to an out-of-court settlement with a former British employee, Alan Ferguson, who claimed he was fired because he failed to bribe a Nigerian official in 1999 to win a drilling contract.
"What we have done about corruption has started to yield results," Obasanjo said Thursday on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Nigeria is consistently ranked by Transparency International as the second-most corrupt nation in the world after Bangladesh. Payoffs are nearly mandatory for everything from traffic violations to getting phone connections.
Nigerian officials, however, bristle at their negative image abroad, accusing favor-seeking foreign firms of fostering a culture of graft. Some foreign firms have served as both "sponsors and perpetrators of corruption," Chikelu said.
But Williams of Transparency International insists that despite foreign connections, Nigerian graft is homegrown. "If Nigerians are not bribe-takers," he said, "then nobody can bribe them."
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Associated Press writer Laurence Frost in Paris contributed to this report.
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