Fresh Information released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, ICIJ, has fingered Former Vice-president, Atiku Abubakar and his wife, Rukaiyat as alleged beneficiaries of a Money laundering/Corruption scheme perpetrated by some banks in the United States.
Secret U.S. government documents reveal that JPMorgan Chase, HSBC and other big banks have defied money laundering crackdowns by moving staggering sums of illicit cash for shadowy characters and criminal networks that have spread chaos and undermined democracy around the world, ICIJ reports.
Five Global banks – JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon reportedly kept profiting from powerful and dangerous players even after U.S. authorities fined these financial institutions for earlier failures to stem flows of dirty money.
Several political and business figures were mentioned as beneficiaries of the money laundering/Corruption scheme.
Atiku and Rukaiyat Abubakar
According to investigations and carried out by ICIJ, The Abubakars carried out transactions to the tune of $24.6 million dollars from 2012 – 2016 through 4 banks namely; Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas, Habib Bank Limited New York, Citibank and BSI AG.
Rukaiyatu is one of four current wives of Atiku, who was vice president of Nigeria from 1999 to 2007.
In 2006, Nigerian anti-corruption investigators accused Atiku Abubakar of fraudulently diverting $125 million of state revenue to private interests. U.S. prosecutors also alleged that a Louisiana congressman tried to bribe Atiku Abubakar to help a Nigerian technology company.
On March 5, 2012, Rukaiyatu Abubakar’s Guernsey Trust Company Nigeria sent more than $1 million to a company in the United Arab Emirates, Tanjay Real Estate Brokers. (GTCN exists to “manage a blind trust” for Atiku Abubkar’s benefit, according to documents received by the U.S. Senate.)
Habib Bank Limited in New York filed a suspicious activity report, citing Atiku Abubakar’s history of alleged corruption, after its Dubai office received the payment. The bank’s Dubai branch explained to the office in New York that the payment was to buy an apartment and that the Dubai branch was “unaware of any existing relationship or affiliation between Tanjay and the Abubakar family.”
Habib Bank reported the transactions because they “crossed multiple high-risk jurisdictions” and because “public sources revealed that there have been numerous investigations of Mr. Abubakar … linking him to corruption allegations.”
