The International Chamber of Commerce arbitration in Paris has finally done what Nigerian politics has failed to do for twenty years – it has placed the Mambilla hydropower scandal on a forensic table and shown the fingerprints.
The story is simple and dirty. Leno Adesanya, promoter of Sunrise Power and Transmission Company Limited, a company incorporated on October 9, 2001 with zero track record in building a 3,960MW hydroelectric dam, wanted the biggest power contract in Africa’s history. On January 30, 2003, his offshore vehicle, China Castle Investments Limited, wired $500,000 into the Citibank account in America of Jennifer Douglas, wife of then Vice President Atiku Abubakar.
Two weeks earlier, Sunrise had presented its tender to a multi-agency technical committee. Two weeks after the technical committee recommended Sunrise, and less than four months after the $500,000 landed, a letter dated May 22, 2003 purportedly awarding Sunrise the Build-Operate-Transfer contract for Mambilla was issued by then Power Minister Olu Agunloye – against President Olusegun Obasanjo’s explicit reservation at the Federal Executive Council.
As the ICC Tribunal itself concluded: “There is a close connection in time between the moment the USD 500,000 payment was made to the wife of Vice-President Abubakar on 30 January 2003 and the alleged award of the BOT contract to Sunrise on 22 May 2003.”
Adesanya’s defence collapsed under cross-examination. He claimed the half-a-million dollars was a bureau de change transaction for Atiku, executed through Moneyline Ventures Limited. The Tribunal found he could not produce a single naira receipt, exchange rate, instruction letter, or correspondence. He admitted China Castle, the actual sender, was not even licensed for forex trading and that forex was outside its corporate purpose. He claimed Atiku’s lawyers confirmed it was forex, then admitted that confirmation came from “Dr Ndukwe”, Atiku’s medical doctor, and that it was his “logical assumption” that Atiku had been consulted. He said Jennifer Douglas would not pick his call because she fell out with him over her divorce from Atiku, contradicting his own witness statement where he called her a close friend and his first girlfriend in high school.
Neither Atiku nor Douglas dared to give evidence. The Tribunal noted no witness statement was submitted from them to corroborate the forex story. Adesanya said Atiku was reluctant to be involved in proceedings concerning Obasanjo. The truth is more cynical – to testify would have meant being cross-examined about the money trail that already featured in the 2010 US Senate investigation, “Keeping Foreign Corruption out of the United States: Four Case Histories”, where Douglas, when questioned by banks about $40 million in suspicious offshore transfers, said the money came from her husband and she did not know the offshore companies.
This is the Atiku model that Nigerians know too well. It is the same model that produced the P&ID $11 billion phantom gas project trap. A politically exposed person, at the peak of his power in 2003 when he was described in a February 2003 US diplomatic cable as an “Atiku insider” who would become “de facto head of government”, uses his office to push through a contract to an unqualified proxy. When the government rightly refuses to execute it, the proxy sues Nigeria for billions – $2.35 billion in the first arbitration, then $400 million plus interest in the second, after a failed $200 million settlement.
Who paid the price for defending Nigeria? Obasanjo and Muhammadu Buhari went to Paris to defend the country. Atiku, whose wife received the money and whose influence made the award possible, hid.
That is why the APC Campaign Council is right to call him unfit. The $500,000 is not an isolated transfer. It is evidence of a mindset that sees public projects not as development opportunities but as brokerage fees. Taraba State, which should have been hosting the largest hydropower project in Nigeria with massive jobs and economic spin-offs, has waited 23 years because a Vice President and a Minister chose to do a backdoor deal in the dying days of a first term.
Atiku’s legendary corruption, documented by Obasanjo himself in My Watch as “his propensity to corruption… his trust in money to buy his way out on all issues and his readiness to sacrifice morality, integrity, propriety, truth and national interest for self and selfish interest,” has once again reverberated beyond our borders.
The Paris Tribunal dismissed Sunrise’s claims and ordered Adesanya and Sunrise to pay 75% of Nigeria’s $11.82 million legal costs. Nigeria dodged a bullet this time. But the receipt for the bullet – $500,000 via China Castle to Citibank on January 30, 2003 – remains in the record, indelible and damning.
