EXCITING NEWS: TNG WhatsApp Channel is LIVE…
Subscribe for FREE to get LIVE NEWS UPDATE. Click here to subscribe!
Swiss lawyer, Enrico Monfrini, hired by the Nigerian government to help trace the billions looted by kleptocratic General Sani Abacha has said $2.4billion has so far been recovered and repatriated to Nigeria.
However, another $192million is locked up in accounts in UK, France and Jersey.
According to Monfrini, $30m of the money is sitting in the UK to be returned, $144m is in France and a further $18m in Jersey.
Monfrini, who is entitled to 4 percent of the recovered loot spoke with the BBC, in a story that reveals how the loot was traced globally.
The whole tracking of the loot from 1999 began with a phone call.
Read the enthralling story as published by BBC:
When Nigeria’s then-head of state Sani Abacha stole billions of dollars and died before spending his loot, it prompted an international treasure hunt spread over decades. The man hired to get the money back tells the BBC’s Clare Spencer how the search took over his life.
In September 1999, Swiss lawyer Enrico Monfrini answered a phone call that would change his next 20 years.
“He called me in the middle of the night, he asked me if I could come to his hotel, he had something of importance. I said: ‘It’s a bit late but OK.’”
The voice on the end of the line was that of a high-ranking member of the Nigerian government.
‘Can you find the money?’
Mr Monfrini says the official was sent to Geneva by the Nigerian president at the time, Olusegun Obasanjo, to recruit him to get hold of the money stolen by Abacha, who ruled from 1993 until his death in 1998.
As a lawyer, Mr Monfrini had built up a Nigerian client base since the 1980s, working in coffee, cocoa and other commodities.
He suspects those clients recommended him.
“He asked me: ‘Can you find the money and can you block the money? Can you arrange that this money be returned to Nigeria?’
“I said: ‘Yes.’ But in fact I didn’t know much about the work at that time. And I had to learn very quickly, so I did.”
To get started, the Nigerian police handed him the details of a few closed Swiss bank accounts, which appeared to be holding some of the money Abacha and his associates had stolen, Mr Monfrini wrote in the book Recovering Stolen Assets.
He said that a preliminary investigation published by the police in November 1998 found that more than $1.5bn (£1.1bn) was stolen by Abacha and his associates.