Abidemi Rufai, the Nigerian citizen accused of stealing more than $350,000 as part of Washington state’s $650 million unemployment fraud, reportedly was also a government official in his home state of Ogun.

According to European and African media accounts on Tuesday, Rufai was a senior special assistant on housing in the Nigerian state of Ogun and an aide to Ogun Governor Dapo Abiodun.

Rufai, of Lekki, Nigeria, was arrested Friday evening by federal agents at New York’s John F. Kennedy airport as he prepared to fly first class to Nigeria by way of Amsterdam, according to federal law enforcement officials.

Rufai, 42, appeared in federal court in New York on Saturday on charges that he used the identities of more than 100 Washington residents to file bogus unemployment claims with the Washington state Employment Security Department during the COVID-19 pandemic last year, according to the federal complaint. It was the first “significant” arrest in that fraud, federal officials said.

On Tuesday, federal prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington in Seattle filed papers arguing that Rufai presents “an extreme risk of flight” and requesting that he be held in custody until his trial in federal court in Tacoma.

Rufai’s attorney, Michael C. Barrows of Garden City, New York, said his client “denies any involvement in these transactions.”

A spokesperson for Gov. Abiodun told the Nigerian newspaper The Vanguard that Rufai has been suspended from his post. “We received the very disturbing news of the arrest of one of the governor’s political appointees, Mr. Abidemi Rufai, in New York over alleged unemployment benefits and fraud in the United States, this morning,” said Kunle Somorin, Abiodun’s chief press secretary, according to The Vanguard.

On an Instagram account, since made private, Rufai posted photos mentioning his government position. He also shared photos of his candidacy for the Nigerian House of Representatives in 2019, which included flyers with the slogan “Ready and Committed to Serve with Trust and Ethics.”

Rufai also owned a sports betting company called Ecobet, according to a profile in a Nigerian business magazine, which described him as “a young business turk,” “a philanthropist of note” and a “gregarious and enterprising dude.”

Rufai was arrested almost a year to the day after Washington officials announced the temporary suspension of unemployment benefit payments, following the discovery that criminals had used stolen Social Security numbers and other personal information to file bogus claims for federal and state unemployment benefits. Other states reported similar attacks.

The federal complaint alleges that Rufai arrived in the United States on Feb. 19, 2020 and left on Aug. 9, 2020, “and was therefore apparently present in the United States during the period of the fraud.”

Federal investigators initially identified Rufai through a single Gmail account he used to file 102 claims for pandemic-related unemployment benefits from the ESD, as well as claims at programs in other states, according to the complaint.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/suspect-in-washington-state-unemployment-fraud-was-a-senior-nigerian-government-aide/

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