{"id":26796,"date":"2022-01-17T06:35:24","date_gmt":"2022-01-17T06:35:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/?p=26796"},"modified":"2022-01-17T06:35:24","modified_gmt":"2022-01-17T06:35:24","slug":"will-bola-tinubus-involvement-in-drugs-fraud-stop-his-presidential-bid-u-s-investigation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/?p=26796","title":{"rendered":"Will Bola Tinubu&#8217;s Involvement in Drugs, Fraud Stop His Presidential Bid? &#8211; U.S Investigation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/alternativeadvert.com\/show.php?z=30&amp;pl=19271&amp;ad_type=81&amp;rl=1800\" width=\"336\" height=\"280\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Nigeria\u2019s election last month was celebrated as an unlikely victory for democracy in an African country with a tenuous record of free and fair representation. But the man most responsible for midwifing General Muhammed Buhari\u2019s ballot triumph over current President Goodluck Jonathan has a spotty CV. Former Lagos provincial governor Bola Tinubu, affectionately nicknamed the Jagaban, is today seen as a shrewd if not \u201cdeeply Machiavellian\u201d Svengali in Nigeria\u2019s politics as well as the architect of a hugely successful anti-corruption platform. But 20 years ago he had to forfeit nearly half a million dollars to the U.S. Treasury Department after being named as an accomplice in a white heroin-trafficking and money-laundering ring that stretched from West Africa to the U.S. Midwest.<\/p>\n<p>Although his case has been bandied about the Nigerian press for years, Tinubu\u2019s involvement in a federal drug and racketeering investigation waged jointly by the DEA, FBI, and IRS has gone unreported elsewhere, even after his ascendance to Karl Rove-like status last month. A recent gauzy\u00a0<i>Financial Times<\/i>\u00a0profile\u00a0of him, for instance, neglected to mention that two decades ago Tinubu was identified as a bagman for two Nigerian heroin movers who operated out of Chicago and Hammond, Indiana. They were Adegboyega Mueez Akande and Abiodun Agbele, Akande\u2019s nephew, who was exposed to law enforcement after selling white heroin first to Lee Andrew Edwards, another dealer later jailed for trying to murder a federal agent, and then to an undercover cop.<\/p>\n<p>In a 1993 court docket from the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Illinois, which The Daily Beast obtained from Sahara Reporters, a Nigeria-focused news outlet, IRS Special Agent Kevin Moss said that Akande had run the white heroin ring in the late 1980s until 1990, when he handed off the U.S arm of the business to his nephew, who had arrived in 1988. Akande then returned to Nigeria but continued to oversee the operation from abroad with the help of others at home and in the United States, including his relatives. One of the individuals identified in his cartel by Moss was Tinubu, then a Chicago State University-educated accountant working as a treasurer for Mobil Oil Nigeria Ltd, a subsidiary of energy giant Mobil Oil, which was still a few years shy of its famous merger with Exxon in 1999.<\/p>\n<p>In the biography section of his official website, Tinubu is described as having emigrated to the United States in 1975 \u201cin search of the proverbial Golden Fleece with a heart brimming with unrelenting determination to achieve his visions.\u201d This is certainly one way to describe his tenure stateside.<\/p>\n<p>In 1989, Moss said in an affidavit, Tinubu established an individual money market account, into which he deposited $1,000 in traveler\u2019s checks, and a negotiable order of withdrawal account (NOW) at First Heritage Bank in Country Club Hills, Illinois. The address Tinubu gave the bank was the same as the listed headquarters of Globe-Link International, the front company owned by Akande and his relatives.<\/p>\n<p>Bank employees told Moss that Akande had personally introduced them to Tinubu in December 1989 when who also opened a joint checking account with his wife, Oluremi Tinubu, who already kept a joint account with Akande\u2019s wife at First Heritage. Five days after the NOW account was opened, $80,000 was wired into it from a bank in Houston maintained by one of Akande\u2019s relatives. Tinubu would later use the NOW account to buy a $10,000 Certificate of Deposit for an $8,000 car loan, listing Akande as his cousin on the application.<\/p>\n<p>At the time, Tinubu\u2019s take home as a Mobil Oil Nigeria executive was a mere $2,400 a month and he claimed not to have any other revenue streams. Yet he still managed to deposit $661,000 into his individual money market account in 1990 and then another $1,216,500 a year later. He also opened more accounts with Citibank in its worldwide personal banking unit, transferring over half a million dollars from his First Heritage money market account into one of them in early 1991.<\/p>\n<p>Mobil Oil Nigeria told Moss that Tinubu\u2019s role at the company never involved transferring large sums of money between banks and that it didn\u2019t keep deposits in any institutions in the south suburbs of Chicago, where First Heritage was based. Moreover, although Tinubu moved back to Nigeria in 1983, he neglected to file U.S. income tax returns after 1984 despite having sizable, interest-generating deposits in American banks. All of this was enough to persuade a magistrate judge of the Northern District to issue seizure warrants for Tinubu\u2019s First Heritage and Citibank accounts. Collectively, more than $1.4 million belonging to the Nigerian was confiscated.<\/p>\n<p>Tinubu gave differing accounts for his wealth to Moss. In one phone call from Nigeria, shortly after the U.S. Treasury seized his money, he admitted to wiring $100,000 to Akande\u2019s Houston bank account and to receiving the $80,000 from Akande into his First Heritage account. Tinubu also said that apart from one other account in Fairfax, Virginia, he had no other money stashed in U.S. banks.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/alternativeadvert.com\/show.php?z=30&amp;pl=19271&amp;ad_type=81&amp;rl=1800\" width=\"336\" height=\"280\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Except that there\u00a0<i>were<\/i>\u00a0other accounts. Citibank has a worldwide banking division known as Citibank International where Tinubu stashed an additional $550,000. He also controlled an entity called Compass Finance and Investments Company Ltd., of which Akande and Agbele were directors. Still another nexus of money transfers was uncovered by federal investigators, with cash moving from First Heritage to Citibank to Citibank International, where it wound up in Tinubu\u2019s personal accounts and in those belonging to Compass Finance and Investments. In a follow-up exchange with law enforcement officers, Tinubu changed his story. Just days after conceding that he\u2019d sent and received money to and from Akande, he insisted that he had no financial or business dealings with Akande or Agbele.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s no evidence that Tinubu was ever indicted for any crime. He eventually settled with the district court, turning over $460,000 of the seized $1.4 million, with the remainder released back to him. The Beast tried repeatedly to contact Marsha McClellan, the U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case, but was unsuccessful.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m not surprised at all,\u201d said Virginia Comolli, a specialist on Nigeria and author of\u00a0<i>Boko Haram: Nigeria\u2019s Islamist Insurgency.\u00a0<\/i>\u201cThere\u2019s a trend of various Nigerian politicians at the highest levels involved in dodgy business deals around the world, in property and cash. Even ones who seem fairly clean turn out to have some dark histories.\u201d The perfect case in point is Tinubu\u2019s political project and new president-elect of Nigeria, General Muhammed Buhari, who in 1983 helped overthrow a democratically elected government in a military\u00a0<i>coup d\u2019etat\u00a0<\/i>on the grounds that the government was undisciplined and corrupt. \u201cHe resorted to brutal methods, beating up people for not queuing properly and imposing limitations on the media,\u201d Comolli said. \u201cI think a lot of the votes Buhari got were anti-Jonathan rather than pro-Buhari.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But no doubt, many also came from a savvy fusion of political factions. In February 2013, Tinubu successfully merged his own influential Action Congress party with Buhari\u2019s Congress for Progressive Change, resulting in the All Progressives Congress. The marriage united Nigeria\u2019s most populous northwest and southwest regions and the ensuing campaign was billed by Tinubu as a \u201ccommonsense revolution\u201d against a corrupt and venal incumbency which, in its five years in power, had seen the terrorist group and newly-minted ISIS affiliate Boko Haram thrive. Buhari swept the election with\u00a02.7 million\u00a0more votes than Jonathan.<\/p>\n<p>Even before that trouncing, however, Tinubu had a relatively positive reputation in Nigeria, according to former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell. \u201cHe is widely regarded as having been a highly successful governor of Lagos state,\u201d he said. \u201cTogether with Tinubu\u2019s handpicked successor, Babatunde Fashola, Lagos has seen dramatic improvements in everything from practical stuff like garbage collection to the collection of taxes and the provision of public services,\u201d Campbell told The Beast. Though even here, the ex-diplomat admits, Tinubu\u2019s good governance has been clouded by controversy. \u201cHe established a company to do the tax collecting in return for a cut and, at one point, Tinubu and Fashola appeared to be splitting over the percentage of Tinubu\u2019s cut.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Drug charges do indeed appear to be the\u00a0<i>sine qua non<\/i>\u00a0for Nigerian high office. The year 1993, when Tinubu\u2019s assets were seized, was a turbulent period for Nigeria following the cancellation of a national election and the establishment of a military dictatorship. Moshood Abiola, the rightful winner of that election, was accused of narcotics trafficking according to Campbell. So too is \u201cPrince\u201d Buruji Kashamu from the People\u2019s Democratic Party, who has faced extradition back to the United States since 1998. Kashamu was indicted by a federal grand jury in Chicago for being the elusive \u201cAlaji,\u201d a globetrotting drug kingpin who smuggled heroin into O\u2019Hare International Airport from Europe and Asia. Piper Kerman, the memoirist who inspired the Netflix series\u00a0<i>Orange is the New Black,\u00a0<\/i>famously worked for Alaji. Kashamu\u00a0denies\u00a0the charges and insists that he was purportedly a counterterrorism informant to the U.S. government before and after 9\/11, and that the real trafficker was his now-deceased brother.<\/p>\n<p>Despite his party\u2019s general loss to the All Progressives Congress, Kashumu was elected in March as senator of the southwest Ogun state. In what appeared to be a magnanimous gesture to the winner, he took out an advertisement praising Tinubu as a role model. The Jagaban was distinctly unimpressed. He trashed the comparison in a statement signed by his media adviser,\u00a0claiming\u00a0that for Kashamu \u201cto liken himself to Bola Tinubu is for a small rut to call itself a mountain.\u201d Tinubu instructed the \u201cfalse praise singer\u201d to go face the music in the Windy City before deigning to talk to him.<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/alternativeadvert.com\/show.php?z=30&amp;pl=19271&amp;ad_type=81&amp;rl=1800\" width=\"336\" height=\"280\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nigeria\u2019s election last month was celebrated as an unlikely victory for democracy in an African country with a tenuous record of free and fair representation. But the man most responsible for midwifing General Muhammed Buhari\u2019s ballot triumph over current President Goodluck Jonathan has a spotty CV. Former Lagos provincial governor Bola Tinubu, affectionately nicknamed the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":26797,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[23,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news","category-national"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/tinubu.jpg","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4oswh-6Yc","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26796"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26798,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26796\/revisions\/26798"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}