Swiss officials have said the $380m siphoned off by
the family of the late Head of State, Gen. Sani
Abacha, and confiscated by the Geneva authorities,
will be returned to Nigeria. The amount is about
N75.2bn at N198/dollar interbank rate.
The file on the matter, opened since 1999, would be
closed, the officials said in a statement on the
website of the Geneva public prosecutor’s office.
According to the office, the move comes now that
Nigeria and the Abacha family have struck a deal.
The Federal Government has long been chasing
funds looted by the Abacha clan while the matriach
was in power from 1994 to 1998.
The prosecutor’s office said overall, the Abacha
clan was thought to have diverted about $5bn from
the Nigerian treasury, adding that much of it ended
up abroad.
“The $380m in question was seized in Luxembourg
in 2006 on the orders of the Geneva justice
authorities. The funds were under the control of
various companies controlled by the Abacha family,
which is considered a criminal organisation,” the
prosecutor’s office said in the statement.
It said the repatriation and confiscation of the funds
followed the conclusion of an agreement in July
2014 between the Federal Government and the
Abacha family. This, it added, set out the
confiscation of the assets and their return to
Nigeria. The Federal Government would drop its
complaint against Abba Abacha, the son of the
former ruler.
According to the prosecutor’s office statement, the
confiscation order “allows, among other things, that
the funds returned to the Federal Republic of Nigeria
are monitored by the World Bank,” and if the
monitoring is not effective, the funds will be
returned to the Geneva authorities.
The statement also said that the file against Abba
Abacha was now closed, based on an article in the
penal code, which allowed criminal proceedings to
be abandoned once the defendant had made
amends as much as was possible.
In 2012, after a legal back and forth, the Geneva
Police Court gave Abba Abacha a one-year
suspended prison sentence for belonging to a
criminal organisation.
Abba was absent from the court room. The Federal
Court in Lausanne, Switzerland’s highest instance,
quashed the sentence in May 2014.
Copyright PUNCH.
Comments
Post a Comment