Former President Goodluck Jonathan has denied allegations that he received $200 million kickback from the notorious OPL 245 Malabu Oil deal. The allegation was reported by an online publication, Buzzfeed and republished by some other newspapers.
In a statement on Tuesday by his media adviser, Ikechukwu Eze, the former presidnet denied the allegation saying that it is “false in its entirety,” adding that it is a “series of fake news”
sponsored by those threatened by Jonathan’s
“continuously rising profile in the international community.”
The statement reads: “Common sense should have shown the purveyors of the slander that the Malabu oil deal far predated the Jonathan regime and it would only make sense for him to be bribed if he had a time machine to go back in time to when the deal was struck.”
According to the statement, the report relied on hearsay evidence from a man of questionable character who provided no substance to back up his false claim.
It reads: “The man quoted by the report said he ‘assumed’ that Dr. Jonathan would be bribed. Since when has the assumption of a crook been enough to smear the reputation of a patriot and international statesman like Dr. Goodluck Jonathan?
“The report also wrongly claimed that Jonathan and Etete had known each other for years, according to Shell staff, when Jonathan served as a tutor to Etete’s children while he was a minister. This claim is clearly ridiculous and nothing can be further from the truth.
“In the first place, the former President couldn’t have been a ‘tutor’ to Etete’s children without first establishing contact with the family. This is because Jonathan met Etete who served as the Petroleum Minister in Gen. Abacha’s military regime for the first time under the succeeding civilian administration, when he was already the deputy Governor of Bayelsa State. Even then, the fact remains that ex-President Jonathan has never met any of Etete’s children.
“Besides, Jonathan couldn’t have been anybody’s private tutor during that period, because he was already in the directorate cadre in Oil Mineral Producing Areas Development Commission (OMPADEC) (now NDDC), having already left the academia, at the time Etete was a serving minister.
“This story, coming so soon after the fake news that Dr. Goodluck Jonathan refused British help in rescuing the Chibok girls (a story that the British Government debunked) and that he plans to contest the 2019 elections (another lie), proves that these fallacious stories are deliberately contrived for reasons that are yet to be publicly disclosed.
“It is instructive that this same old fable apparently intended to rubbish Jonathan’s name locally and internationally, is being recycled with more lies added to garnish the narrative, at a time the ex-President is making efforts to resolve the issues in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
“Again, let us point out for clarity and for the umpteenth time that while he was in office and now that he is out of office, former President Jonathan did not open and does not own any bank account, aircraft or real estate outside Nigeria. Anyone with contrary information is challenged to publicly publish same.”
Dr. Jonathan appealed to the media to report facts rather than innuendo and gossip, reminding the media that he signed the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act into law and that “it is only fair to use it to investigate allegations in order to establish the truth”.
The statement warned that Dr. Jonathan cannot stop criminals from ‘assuming’, but that “he can and he will stop them from getting away with blatant lies.”
The Malabu deal scandal
BuzzFeed News and Italian newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore, had in a joint investigation reveal that Shell’s top executives at the time signed off the deal with full knowledge that the money would go to a front company connected to a former Nigerian oil minister, Dan Etete.
For years, Shell has denied the deal involved any payments from Shell or ENI to Etete – who has been convicted in his absence of money laundering in France in a separate case – or to the company he allegedly controlled, Malabu Oil and Gas.
But documents obtained by BuzzFeed News and Il Sole 24 Ore reveals that: Shell executives knew the deal would benefit Malabu by more than $1 billion.
The former MI6 agents working for the oil giant said Etete would use payments from a deal to pay bribes to others.
Ednan Agaev, a former Russian ambassador and intelligence officer who worked on the deal as a representative of Malabu, told the FBI and Italian prosecutors that Etete had told him he needed to pay $400 million in bribes to senior Nigerian officials and parliamentarians.
Jeffrey Tesler, who admitted guilt as part of a deal with US prosecutors in a separate case involving handling “commissions” for Etete, voluntarily handed over a suitcase containing more than £350,000, allegedly a “gift” from Etete, to a London police station after a company connected with him received $180 million of the proceeds of the deal.
What followed, after the sudden death of Abacha was years of legal wrangling and allegations of corruption,
The deal struck by Shell, ENI, Malabu, and the Nigerian government in 2011 was supposed to see an end to the years of back-and-forth: For a total consideration of $1.3 billion, the Nigerian government awarded the block to Shell and ENI.
The final version of the structure was set up to transfer the $1.09 billion to a London bank account in the name of the government of Nigeria, which then in turn relayed the payment to entities eventually connected with Malabu – meaning that no money from Shell and ENI went directly to Malabu or Etete, even though the deal then benefited Malabu and associates greatly.
In a letter to Dutch authorities, an Italian prosecutor said he had tracked $737 million of transfers “made in the days immediately following the transfer of the sum from the United Kingdom to the Malabu accounts in Nigeria.”
In the summer of 2010, the former MI6 agents warned Shell of the purported involvement of Goodluck Jonathan … which they assumed meant he was looking to get a payout from OPL 245.
“Etete claims he has and has shown a letter from the President reiterating malabu’s 100pc equity/contract ‘award’,” an email from Colegate stated.
“This letter clearly an attempt to deliver significant revenues to GLJ [Jonathan] as part of any transaction.”
These allegations about Goodluck Jonathan – and other alleged bribes – were repeated by Ednan Agaev, a former Russian ambassador and intelligence officer engaged in the OPL 245 negotiations with Shell, representing Malabu.
In an account of his interview given by the FBI to prosecutors, “Agaev was asked about payment of his commission. Agaev stated that he went to Etete and told him to pay him the $65,000,000 fee. Agaev stated that Etete said, ‘I can’t pay you, I have to pay Adoke [Mohammed Bello Adoke, then Nigeria’s attorney general] $400 million and all the other people in the Senate and the National assembly.’ Agaev stated that he would think President Goodluck Jonathan got at least $200 million of this money.”
