Justice Okon Abang, a courageous judge of the Federal High Court in Abuja, in his ruling on the celebrated case of Abdulrasheed Maina, has proved that Nigeria’s high net worth criminals can run but they cannot hide.
Maina is a thief catcher who stole more than the thieves he was sent to catch. Former President Goodluck Jonathan appointed Maina to clear the mess in Nigeria Customs Service, and immigration pension schemes where pocket-size thieves were freely stealing funds as beneficiaries of the scheme slum and die in long screening queues.
Within months of Maina’s appointment, the National Assembly was inundated with petitions about the thief catcher’s horrendous looting. There were claims that Maina acquired two armoured limousines and that his retinue of body guards was more than that of any minister.
The senate waded through the myriads of petitions and summoned Maina to defend himself. The thief catcher ignored the senate and the presidency disdainfully snubbed Maina’s contempt of the nation’s highest legislative arm. For six months Maina engaged the senate in a reprehensible stand-off with the presidency lethargically playing the ostrich.
The showdown with Maina got to a head in 2013 when the senate asked the presidency to choose between it and Maina as calls for his dismissal from service were repeatedly parried.
Maina is a hardened criminal with strong connections in government. Despite the dismissal that followed his massive fraud and contemptuous treatment of the senate, he was smuggled back into the interior ministry in 2018 and promoted a director on salary grade level 17 while still a fugitive.
The promotion of the fugitive sparked a huge tsunami in the federal government with Maina’s backers distancing themselves from the crime of promoting a fugitive and imposing him on defenceless civil servants.
Maina later took his intrigues and crass contempt to the judiciary. After the uproar over the promotion of a treasury looter in the federal civil service, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) slammed charges of fraud against Maina and arraigned him in Abang’s court.
With Maina’s intimidating crime record and seemingly invincible backing in government, the judge knew he was trying a criminal as powerful as Pablo Escoba, the late drug lord of Latin America. Abang’s bail conditions for Maina portrayed the enormity of his crime and his status as a hardened criminal.
The bail was in billions of naira and two sitting senators were required to stand surety for him. Maina spent months in prison before his legal team argued and won a lower condition for the bail.
Ali Ndume, the senator from Maina’s home state of Borno, took the thief catcher on bail. Maina jumped bail and the courageous judge threw a serving senator into prison in demand for the fugitive. The fugitive was eventually arrested in neighbouring Niger Republic and forced to stand trial.
Abang’s ruling on Maina’s gargantuan fraud case inadvertently exposed the soft spot in Nigeria’s futile war against corruption and indisputably explained why Nigeria is persistently sinking low in Transparency International’s corruption perception index.
In his long, winding judgement in Maina’s case, Justice Abang asserted that Maina diverted N300 million, N500 million and N1.5 billion from the pension funds he was sent to watch and deposited the sums in accounts in United Bank for Africa (UBA) and Fidelity Bank under the names of his relatives without the knowledge of the people whose names he used to open the accounts.
The judge argued that the two banks should have been arraigned with Maina, given the weight of the evidence of the collaboration with the treasury looter.
There is no way the banks could feign ignorance of the fraud that robbed thousands of genuine pensioners of their funds and starved scores of them to death. No one steals billions without the knowledge of banks.
The law of the land empowers banks to vet the sources of the funds deposited with them apparently to stem treasury looting. For obvious reasons, banks are discriminatory in their use of that power.
Daily Times, my first employer, opened a salary account for me in the Oba Akran branch of First Bank in Lagos in November 1984. I operated the account for almost 20 years without knowing the manager of the branch.
In 2003, when the Daily Times was to be privatised, the workers’ union demanded that the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) must settle the salary arrears of workers before the sale.
Consequently, BPE issued a cheque of N1.5 million in my name to clear the salary arrears owed by my employer. I lodged the cheque in my account in First Bank and within days of the lodgment I had an ominous phone call from the branch manager.
I showed up on demand and the branch manager drilled me on the source of the N1.5 million in my account.
The cheque was cleared only after I satisfactorily explained the source of the fund. No bank screens lodgments from high net worth treasury looters. They know them but they feign ignorance of the source of funds.
Treasury looters now steal billions of naira with impunity because banks are willing collaborators. During the on-going trial of Ayo Fayose, the immediate past governor of Ekiti state, it was testified in court that a bank’s bullion van was used to ferry the billions of naira diverted from public till for funding the former governor’s election campaigns.
Some banks have established notoriety for money laundering and no one has lifted a finger in protest. Diezani Alison-Madueke, a former minister of petroleum, used a bank to change $114 million into naira and distributed it to electoral officials in a desperate bid to influence the 2015 presidential election.
Today, some of the bribe takers are in jail. Ironically, a former managing director of the bank who presided over the distribution of the bribe money only appeared as prosecution witness.
Banks are the fulcrum of the mesmerising crime of treasury looting. No one loots billions of naira without passing through a bank. Treasury looting could be reduced drastically if banks are compelled to reject stolen funds.
The war on corruption had all along ignored banks or at most treated them as prosecution witnesses in fraud cases. The war would only succeed when banks are regarded as collaborators and treated as such.
Justice Abang has exposed the weak spot in Nigeria’s war against corruption. It is now left for EFCC to prosecute collaborating banks to deter looters.
