Operation Tureen: How Ibori reached the End.

Former Governor James Onanefe
Ibori of Delta State today entered a
guilty plea at his money laundering
trial at a Southwark Crown Court in
London, the UK.
Mr. Ibori’s admission of guilt closed
the chapter on arguably the most
dramatic judicial and political saga
involving a Nigerian public official in
recent years. Today’s development
came as a stunning finale to one of
the most phenomenal money
laundering and fraud cases
spanning seven years of an
intensive manhunt. That drama
ended as the once powerful former
governor, who loved to be flattered
with his flamboyant nickname of
Odidigborigbo of Africa, avoided an
exhaustive and revealing trial by
deciding to admit to his massive
money laundering activities during
his two-term run as governor.
A source with the Crown Prosecution
Services in the UK told
SaharaReporters that, with today’s
plea, Mr. Ibori faces up to 10 years
in a UK prison at his sentencing.
The former governor will be
sentenced after the completion of
the trial of his accomplice and
financial advisor, Elias Preko, a
Ghanaian national. Mr. Ibori, a
graduate of the University of Benin,
today’s admission of guilt ends a
full circle of a life of crime that
began with petty theft in the early
1990s when he lived as a poor
immigrant in London and developed
into a full-fledged, big-time career in
money laundering and other
complex financial crimes during his
governorship of one of Nigeria’s
richest oil-producing states.
Diplomatic sources as well as
international crime investigators
believe that Mr. Ibori stole close to $
3 billion from the coffers of Delta
State. Over the years,
SaharaReporters chronicled Mr.
Ibori’s life in crime, beginning with
our exposure of the details of the
former governor’s early small-time
crimes in the early 1990s when he
and his then girlfriend and future
wife, Theresa Nkoyo, began stealing
building materials at a Wikes shop
in London where Theresa worked. A
UK court tried and fined him for
burglary and possession of stolen
credit cards.
Ibori returned to Nigeria during the
regime of dreaded dictator Sani
Abacha. In Nigeria, Mr. Ibori took up
his life of crime, spearheading the
looting a building construction site
in Abuja. Then, after craftily
changing his date of birth, Mr. Ibori
was recruited by Mr. Abacha’s chief
security officer, Al Mustapha, whose
involvement in the regime’s
network of criminal activities
recently earned him a death
sentence for the assassination of
Kudirat Abiola, wife of then
president-elect M.K.O. Abiola.
Security sources told
SaharaReporters that Mr. Ibori
became a deadly member of Mr.
Abacha’s extensive machinery of
repression that included killer
squads that went after leading
opponents of the regime. Mr. Ibori is
believed to have led the group of
assassins that killed Alfred Rewane,
a prominent businessman and
financier of pro-democracy groups
opposed to Mr. Abacha.
As Nigeria returned to some form of
democracy in the post-Abacha era,
Mr. Ibori was able to parlay the
monumental wealth he accumulated
from the dictator’s regime into
remaking himself as a political star
in the corrupt conclave of Nigerian
politics, pitching his tent with the
most corrupt of all the parties, the
Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
Successfully covering up his
conviction for stealing building
materials in Abuja as well as his
petty crime convictions in the UK,
Mr. Ibori sought and won the
mandate of the PDP as the party’s
governorship candidate in 1999.
Once elected as governor of one of
Nigeria’s richest states in the oil-
producing Niger Delta region, Mr.
Ibori began looting the treasury of
the state with the aid of his wife, a
mistress, his younger sister, well-
heeled lawyers in London, and his
cousin, Emmanuel Uduaghan, who
was crowned gubernatorial
successor before Ibori ran out of
luck. By the time Ibori was done
with the treasury of Delta State, he
had become one of the richest
Nigerians, owning an airline
company, using criminal schemes to
buy over the national fertilizer
company, acquiring mansions in
different parts of Nigeria as well as
choice real estate in London, the
United Arab Emirate, and the U.S.
Also, by the end of his reign as
governor, Mr. Ibori was so politically
powerful and financially rich that he
almost singlehandedly financed the
presidential campaign of deceased
Nigerian ruler Umaru Yar’adua,
helping to spearhead the rigging
that swept the man into the
Nigerian presidency.
A grateful Yar’adua shielded Mr.
Ibori from any serious prosecution
for corruption. On his part, Mr. Ibori
had used massive cash gifts to top
members of Nigeria’s judiciary,
including Supreme Court justices
Niki Tobi, Alfa Belgore and Aloysius
Katsina-Alu, to cultivate an
extremely cozy relationship with
critical players in the nation’s
judiciary. With many senior judges
on his payroll, he found it easy to
manipulate the judiciary. When
opposition opponents accused him
of being convicted for the theft of
building materials, Mr. Ibori easily
slipped away. Despite glaring
evidence that he was involved in
business scams, corruption and
stealing, Nigerian judges, from the
magistrate level all the way to the
Supreme Court, thwarted the course
of justice and let Ibori walk free.
Several judges ruled that he was
not the same James Onanefe Ibori
named in the conviction.
Famously known as the “Sheikh,”
Mr. Ibori became the darling of
hustlers and a man that seemed
larger than life, inspiring fear in
many of his critics in Delta State.
Many politicians and Nigerians
regarded Ibori as possessing power
over life and death. He had bankers
at his beck and call and he had his
own newspaper. As governor, he
was reputed to have a killer squad
to snuff life out of his opponents. He
famously summoned former
Inspector General of Police Mike
Okiro to his country home. On one
occasion, during his detention on
money laundering charges, former
IG Okiro sent the only functioning
police helicopter to ferry him from
Kaduna Prison to Abuja because he
complained of headache.
A Nigerian police officer named
Nuhu Ribadu, who served as
chairman of the Economic and
Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC)
, was to become Ibori’s major
nemesis. In 2005, Mr. Ribadu began
coordinating a series of local and
international investigations against
Mr. Ibori. The investigation was
tagged “Operation Tureen.”
The investigators looked at several
transactions undertaken by Mr. Ibori
using a web of sophisticated
methods and schemes that involved
banks, bureaus de change,
multinational corporations as well as
a U.S.-based equity firm to launder
funds looted from Delta State. The
Proceeds of Crime Unit at the
London Metropolitan Police played a
critical role in the extensive
investigation which culminated in
an asset freeze order that targeted
some $35 million traced to Mr. Ibori.
The asset freeze order revealed that
Mr. Ibori was about to take delivery
of a Bombardier jet from Canada.
The delivery had been delayed only
because Mr. Ibori demanded that an
I-Pod jack be installed on each seat
on the plane.
The asset freeze order suffered a
temporary setback when Mr. Ibori
deployed a team of high-powered
lawyers in London to roll it back.
Even so, a determined team of UK
police officers and lawyers from the
Crown Prosecution Services led by
Sasha Walsh, would not relent.
Instead, they widened their dragnet
to take down Mr. Ibori’s sister,
Christine Ibie-Ibori, his girlfriend,
Udoamaka Okoronkwo (nee
Onuigbo), his wife Theresa Nkoyo-
Ibori, and one of his London-based
lawyers, Bhadresh Gohil
Despite the crumbling of his money
laundering machinery in the UK, Mr.
Ibori’s was waxing politically
stronger in Nigeria. In one
demonstration of his invincibility in
Nigeria, he insisted that former
President Yar’adua remove Mr.
Ribadu from chairmanship of the
EFCC and also dismantle the top
leadership of the anti-corruption
agency. Subjected to constant
humiliation after his removal from
the EFCC, Mr. Ribadu was ultimately
hounded into exile. With the
consent of an ailing President
Yar’adua, Mr. Ibori also installed
Farida Waziri as head of the EFCC.
He also had the then attorney
general of the federal, Michael
Aondoakaa, to do his bidding.
SaharaReporters exposed the fact
that Mr. Aondoakaa wrote several
letters to Mr. Ibori’s defense team in
London claiming that the Nigerian
government had found no evidence
of corruption on the part of the
former governor. Mr. Aondoakaa
also sought to prohibit U.K.
prosecutors from using any
evidence provided by Mr. Ribadu’s
EFCC in the prosecution of Mr.
Ibori’s associates undergoing money
laundering trials in London.
In another sign of his untouchable
status in Nigeria, Mr. Ibori
engineered to have his money
laundering trial transferred to the
Delta State capital of Asaba in a
hastily assembled, brand new
federal high court. The court sat in a
house bought from one of the
former governor’s political
associates. Mr. Ibori was allowed to
choose Justice Marcel Awokulehin, a
notoriously corrupt judge, to preside
over his charade of a trial. He also
chose his prosecutor, a man who in
court made a habit of agreeing with
any motion that Mr. Ibori’s defense
lawyers made. In an outcome that
SaharaReporters predicted, the 170
counts of money laundering in
Nigeria were made to collapse, with
Justice Awokulehin, who received a
bribe of $5 million, proclaiming Mr.
Ibori’s innocence.
With questions still cast over Mr.
Ibori’s trial in Nigeria, his alma
mater, the University of Benin,
hastily organized a founder’s day
lecture to project him as a hero. The
former governor also made a round
of the Nigeria media to insist on his
innocence and to deny that he ever
offered Mr. Ribadu a bribe of $15
million in order to stave off
prosecution.
As soon as Yar’adua died in 2010,
the political calculation changed.
The tide turned against Mr. Ibori as
then acting President Goodluck
Jonathan ramped up political
pressure against Mr. Ibori who, as
one of the closest confidants of the
late ruler, had often ridiculed Mr.
Jonathan and prevented him from
becoming acting president even as
it was clear that Mr. Yar’adua was
incapacitated in a Saudi hospital.
To thwart a feeble attempt made to
re-arrest him, Mr. Ibori fled to Dubai.
However, his run was shortlived
when an international dragnet by
the UK police caught up with him.
UK authorities filed an extradition
request in Dubai to snag up the
fugitive former governor, wanted in
the UK to answer to the use of
financial institutions in that country
to engage in money laundering.
Mr. Ibori’s relentless fight in a Dubai
court to return to Nigeria instead
failed. He was eventually flown to
the UK in 2010 where he remained
in custody till today’s guilty plea.
From his UK detention, Mr. Ibori had
coordinated and launched a
deceptive media campaign. Mr.
Ibori’s associates funded some
Nigerian-owned blogs that alleged,
among other things, that UK police
investigators had accepted bribes
from his associates; that the
prosecution’s case against him was
weak; and even that the
prosecution was on the verge of
abandoning their case.
A source close to Mr. Ibori told
SaharaReporters that the former
governor’s well-funded propaganda
collapsed last week when his well-
paid attorneys told him he had a
bad case. Feeling utterly, Mr. Ibori
came to terms with the fact that he
could not maneuver his way out of
the legal logjam as he was able to
do in his fake Nigerian trial.
A UK-based lawyer told
SaharaReporters that, in pleading
guilty today, Mr. Ibori hoped to
avoid receiving the maximum
sentence for his crimes. Even so,
the source suggested that the
former governor should expect a
sentence in the range of 10-12
years.
But that could be only the
beginning of his troubles as the
London Metropolitan police plan to
go after his assets all over the
world.

Source: Sahara reporters