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Nigeria, Switzerland sign accord on Abacha loot

Nigeria and Switzerland on Tuesday announced an agreement to return $321 million in public funds stolen by the former military ruler Sani Abacha.
Osinbajo

Osinbajo

Nigeria and Switzerland on Tuesday announced an agreement to return $321 million in public funds stolen by the former military ruler Sani Abacha.

The agreement came after a meeting in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, between Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo and a Swiss delegation including the country’s foreign minister and ambassador.

Both countries said the “letter of intent” to return the money provided a framework to help recover other looted funds by corrupt officials and to determine how it would be spent once repatriated.

“We guarantee that recovered assets would be put to uses for which they have been intended,” Osinbajo said in an emailed statement.

“The framework will guarantee that returned assets will be used in the interest of the people of this country.”

Abacha, in power from 1993 until his death in 1998, is suspected of having siphoned off $2.2 billion from Nigeria’s central bank in what the United States has called “brazen acts of kleptocracy”.

The head of Switzerland’s Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, Didier Burkhalter, said Switzerland was the first country to have returned a share of Abacha’s ill-gotten wealth.

Ten years ago, some $720 million was returned to Nigeria, he said in a statement on the Swiss foreign affairs website.

The $321 million was initially deposited in Luxembourg but confiscated by a court in Geneva in December 2014.

Burkhalter said the fight against corruption was “one of Switzerland’s priorities” and the letter of intent “confirmed the principle of returning stolen assets monitored by the World Bank.

“This monitoring is a legal requirement to ensure that the funds can indeed be returned to Nigeria and used, as set out in the agreement, to support social programmes to assist the people of Nigeria,” he added.

Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari has begun a purge of corruption since taking office last year and vowed to recover what he said were “mind-boggling” sums of money stolen over decades.

2 Comments

  • Author’s gravatar

    I believe in VP Osinbajos statement about the judicious use of the returned stolen funds but can the government be more transparent and let the public know how and what these returned monies are used for. Our infrastructure is extremely bad and needs a total overhaul among other things. Let the government put these loot into meaningful use and put a signboard containing information about the use of the loot near the infrastructure being built or repaired.

  • Author’s gravatar

    Good enough that the stolen funds are being returned but I have only one question o.When the funds were being stolen back in ’98 why was it not returned immediately? With how enlightened the Swiss government is, they cannot tell me they had no clue the funds were stolen.This is what, almost 10 years later and they decide to return the money when it most definately has appreciated over time in their economy. They have the nerve to call it stolen funds and say Nigeria is corrupt.They who kept the money for these years, are they saints? If their intention was noble in the first place they should have cried foul since ’98 when all the shifting of funds was done. Corruption is a vicious cycle and as far as I am concerned they are as corrupt as the country who did the loot in the first place.I rest my case.