In the wood-panelled sobriety of Court 7 at Southwark Crown Court, a trial is unfolding that feels less like a standard criminal prosecution and more like a complex riddle found in a final-year law examination. For Day 14 of the proceedings against Diezani Alison-Madueke, Nigeria’s former Minister of Petroleum Resources, the legal framework underpinning the Crown’s case presents a configuration that strains the traditional boundaries of the Bribery Act 2010.
Consider the hypothetical: a high-stakes bribery case where the individuals alleged to have paid the inducements are not themselves on trial. A case where the Crown cannot point to a single, definitive transfer of cash into the defendant’s hands and label it the bribe. Most curiously, it is a case where the prosecution has formally admitted—as a matter of “agreed fact”—that it does not allege the defendant actually improperly influenced the very thing those bribes were intended to secure: the award of lucrative oil and gas contracts.
In[b] the lexicon of the City and the bar, this raises a fundamental question: what, precisely, is the corruption? In UK criminal proceedings, “agreed facts” are points formally accepted by both sides, which the jury is directed to treat as undisputed truth. In this instance, the Crown has signed a statement confirming “it is not suggested by the prosecution that DAM improperly influenced the award of any oil or gas contract.” To a legal mind, this is an extraordinary concession. Usually, the “improper performance” of a public function is the fulcrum of a bribery charge. Here, that fulcrum has been removed by the prosecution itself, leaving the jury to navigate a mosaic of department-store receipts and lifestyle perks without a corresponding “quid pro quo” in the awarding of state assets.
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The Abuja Inventory: A Case of Multiplying Bags
The oddities of the legal theory in London are mirrored by procedural irregularities 3,000 miles away in Abuja. The trial has shone a harsh light on the institutional record-keeping of Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), exposing a chain of custody that appears, at best, malleable.
Chinedu Philip Eneanya, an EFCC investigator, was recently called to explain a late-stage review of evidence seized from Mrs. Alison-Madueke’s Abuja residence a decade ago. Acting on a mutual legal assistance request from the UK, Eneanya examined material held in “secure lock-up.” However, a comparison of inventories revealed a startling discrepancy. In 2018, a schedule prepared by then-investigator Abdulrasheed Bawa recorded precisely two “Ghana-must-go” bags of evidence. By the time Eneanya conducted his review in late 2025, the count had grown to three.
If we are to believe the EFCC’s chain of custody is as secure as the agency claims, we might be forced to consider the improbable: that the original two bags found a way to reproduce and give birth to a third while in storage. If we cannot accept that bit of biological magic, we must go the more logical route: the EFCC suffers from a significant chain-of-custody inadequacy where evidence can be added to or removed from in ways that make it difficult to trust its claims.
Under cross-examination, Eneanya admitted he had no involvement in the original 2015 search and could not explain the phantom bag. For an agency that has spent a decade casting the defendant as the face of national rot, this inability to maintain a basic exhibit count strikes at the integrity of the entire investigation. If items can be silently added over a ten-year period, the shadow of doubt regarding what might have been removed or altered becomes impossible to ignore.
The Paper Trail vs. The Missing Records
The prosecution’s narrative of a “shadow” lifestyle is further complicated by the defendant’s own reliance on official channels. During her tenure, Mrs. Alison-Madueke generated an extensive paper trail, submitting formal requests for presidential approval for foreign travel, which triggered standard processes for estacodes and allowances.
The EFCC’s Eneanya was tasked with sifting through the Abuja-seized material specifically to find receipts showing state bodies paying for personal expenses abroad. He found none. However, he did recover numerous formal requests for travel approvals, reinforcing that the defendant operated within the official system. To a seasoned observer, the logic is jarring: a minister intent on illicitly siphoning perks does not typically invite the state to document her every move. The absence of reimbursement records in a compromised EFCC archive may speak less to a lack of repayment and more to the selective transmission of files by a hostile agency.
Pillars of the Bribery Act
To calibrate the Crown’s case, one must look to the strictures of the Bribery Act 2010. The Act identifies two primary offences: the “active” bribery of another person (Section 1) and the “passive” acceptance of a bribe (Section 2). Crucially, both require a “wrongfulness element”—the advantage must be intended to induce or reward the improper performance of a relevant function.
In Court 7, this template is under immense strain. Because the Crown admits there was no improper influence on the contracts, the “wrongfulness” must be found in the mere acceptance of the hospitality itself. Yet, the amounts in question—five-figure spends at Harrods—are, in the context of the global petroleum industry, remarkably modest. As one observer noted, such sums “would struggle to move a mid-level manager in the palm-oil trade.” To suggest that a former Shell executive director sold her professional integrity for department-store vouchers requires a significant leap of faith from the jury.
Institutional Momentum and Tunnel Vision
As the trial reaches its midpoint, the impression is one of “tunnel vision.” It is entirely possible that the National Crime Agency (NCA) and the EFCC began this decade-long journey with a sincere desire to confront systemic corruption. Their commitment to public accountability is commendable. However, there is a distinct sense that this impulse eventually hardened into a fixation on performance—a need to secure a high-profile conviction that blinded the agencies to the gaps in their own evidence.
When the evidential road began to narrow to mid-range luxury purchases and a compromised Nigerian archive, the investigators seem to have found it impossible to backtrack or even take a detour. Instead, they remained committed to an outcome—the “taking down” of one woman—even when the paper trail refused to match the narrative.
Whatever one’s view of Diezani Alison-Madueke, a system that allows political hostility and evidential insecurity to substitute for proof of “improper performance” is a system that should worry us all. If the goal was to clean up the industry, the irony is that this trial may instead demonstrate the danger of letting an obsession with a specific result override the basic requirements of justice. The truth, it seems, has been lost in the pursuit of the legend.
