Especially drug money, which MC Oluomo’s godfather is known for
Tinubu mistakenly shared flats with drug lords in Chicago: Festus Keyamo
The campaign spokesman said the candidate incidentally shared an address with notorious cocaine dealers in the 1990s.
Festus Keyamo, chief spokesman for the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential campaign council, has said Bola Tinubu, the party’s flag bearer, only shared a “block of flats” with notorious cocaine dealers in Chicago, pushing back after the release of court documents that suggested Mr Tinubu’s ties to illicit drug business and money laundering in the United States.
“What happened was that Asiwaju (Bola Tinubu) went to open an account. The address which he used in opening the account was the address used by these people…(sic). I think some blocks of flats. Maybe, he happened to be in that block of flats too.
“So, they now link it that the other people they were investigating for narcotics are in the same address used by Asiwaju to open that account,” Mr Keyamo said on Wednesday on Channels Television programme to exonerate the former Lagos governor from the fresh controversies that had been trailing his involvement in drug peddling.
Peoples Gazette on Tuesday published certified copies of the 1993 case as recently released by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
The documents confirmed that the U.S. government had in July 1993 sought forfeiture of proceeds of narcotics Mr Tinubu was accused of laundering. The matter was resolved in a compromise between the Tinubus and the U.S. authorities, with the Tinubus being asked to keep the money in the Heritage Bank account while the $460,000 in the Citibank account was forfeited.
A federal judge subsequently dismissed the matter with prejudice on September 21, 1993, which effectively foreclosed the matter from being litigated again by all parties. It, however, remained unclear whether or not Nigerian authorities could still bring charges against Mr Tinubu over the same case in Nigerian courts.
The former Lagos governor has come under intense public scrutiny over his opaque past, health status and allegations of corruption. He has not personally commented on the latest case, but his campaign surrogates have emphasised that the matter was insignificant and would not be a factor in the upcoming elections.
Francis5: Nigeria’s Next Leader’s Ties to a Heroin Ring
Former Lagos provincial governor Bola Tinubu, affectionately nicknamed the Jagaban, is today seen as a shrewd if not “deeply Machiavellian” Svengali in Nigeria’s 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.
Although his case has been bandied about the Nigerian press for years, Tinubu’s 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 Financial Times profile of 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’s 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.
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.
In the biography section of his official website, Tinubu is described as having emigrated to the United States in 1975 “in search of the proverbial Golden Fleece with a heart brimming with unrelenting determination to achieve his visions.” This is certainly one way to describe his tenure stateside.
In 1989, Moss said in an affidavit, Tinubu established an individual money market account, into which he deposited $1,000 in traveler’s 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.
“There’s a trend of various Nigerian politicians at the highest levels involved in dodgy business deals around the world, in property and cash.”
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’s 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’s 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.
At the time, Tinubu’s 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.
Mobil Oil Nigeria told Moss that Tinubu’s role at the company never involved transferring large sums of money between banks and that it didn’t 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’s First Heritage and Citibank accounts. Collectively, more than $1.4 million belonging to the Nigerian was confiscated.
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Seun its like you like how this dude paints or spams nairaland with his alms and dirty photos this is becoming too anoying...
Gay wey don fvck almost all actress , Gay with many wife and concubine..
E no follow. One of our ex presidio weh them say being de nack one fine man weh him face de glo, sotey him give am oil block turn am to billionaire nko?
E no follow. One of our ex presidio weh them say being de nack one fine man weh him face de glo, sotey him give am oil block turn am to billionaire nko?
Where una dey here fake gist... Naso dem talksay Maradona knack alakija for oil bloc, now Na Adenuga
Where una dey here fake gist... Naso dem talksay Maradona knack alakija for oil bloc, now Na Adenuga
Nnairaland sef
Kai, that gist na decades old tori. No be today. Them plenty. Even one ojo oga weh don peme, rumors say him been de nack one fine boy copper weh come become the youngest head ever of those low budget olopa weh de make sure road de safe. Most of those ogas de fire from the rear. E no mean say madam no de house. The thing be like cult, na so them go fit trust persin. Them must fire first.
