Former military Head of State,
Muhammadu Buhari, who served Abacha
as Executive Chairman of the Petroleum
Trust Fund (PTF) has come under some
embarrassment over his comments in
2008 that Abacha never stole as new
Abacha loot has been traced.
Buhari, in 2007, described the allegations
of looting against Abacha as “baseless”,
because according to him, “ten years after
Abacha, those allegations remain
unproven because of lack of facts”.
However, fresh facts emerged that the
previous estimate of what Abacha stole
which stood at $5 Billion may be wrong.
A competent source close to the Special
Investigation Panel (SIP), whose office is
in the presidency told journalists that
about four different meetings between
the SIP team headed by a retired senior
military officer and a Switzerland-based
lawyer, Enrico Monfrini, hired by the
Federal Government to assist in the
recovery of the Abacha loot in foreign
jurisdictions, had taken place outside the
country in the last eight months.
Monfrini is an Attorney-at-Law, Monfrini
Grettol & Associés, Geneva, Switzerland.
The source, who preferred to be
anonymous because of the sensitive
nature of the subject, said: “In the course
of the recent meetings between the
Nigerian team and authorities in about
four other jurisdictions as well as the
team from the foreign legal firm, it was
discovered that a lot of underhand
dealings must have taken place in the
recovery of the Abacha loot.
“This was largely responsible for the
under-declaration of what has been
recovered so far by three successive
governments and worse still what is still
trapped in offshore accounts.” Some of
the foreign jurisdictions, where the stolen
funds had been traced to include
Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Switzerland,
the United Kingdom and the United States.
One of the latest discoveries includes a
$550 million in a coded account in
France. “It has been very difficult to get
details out into the public domain so far
because the latest process is being
secretly coordinated by the retired senior
military officer heading the SIP in the
presidency and the Attorney General of
the federation, who provides legal advice
for the team,” the source added. The
Federal Government was said to have
been encouraged to dig deeper into the
Abacha loot because of a recent
statement credited to the Swiss lawyer,
Monfrini, handling the case.
Only the administration of former
President Olusegun Obasanjo has been
able to record the highest amount of
$1.25 billion from the Abacha loot. The
preceding regime of General Abdulsalami
Abubakar and the succeeding
government of the late President Umar
Musa Yar’Adua could not do much in this
regard notwithstanding the efforts also
made. Obasanjo recently gave an
indication that much could still be trapped
outside the country when he declared, at
a function in Delta State: “When I was
president, I called the World Bank.
I said, please, give me the list of the
amount that has been stolen, where it is
kept and who the beneficiaries are. I
never got anything from the World Bank
thereafter. We have on our own decided
that we will investigate and get from one
family, Abacha family alone. “From the
Abacha family alone, we recovered
millions of dollars. I got 1.25 billion
dollars and the lawyer in Switzerland (he
is still there), who was doing it for us,
said, when I was leaving, that if we
worked harder, there was still, at least,
one billion dollars that we can get from
that family alone.”

SOURCE:
www.newsinnigeria.org/2013/04/buhari-embarrassed-as-more-abacha-loot-is-uncovered-after-he-said-abacha-never-stole.html

You just can't trust this man....