United States judge has allowed Nigeria’s application to subpoena 10 US banks to grant access to account statements of former top public officeholders, including former President Goodluck Jonathan.
The Federal Government is currently contesting the decision of a UK court which awarded a sum of $9.6 billion against it in favour of Process and Industrial Developments Ltd (P&ID).
The FG therefore filed an application before the US court seeking permission to subpoena information on transactions involving top government officials, including Goodluck Jonathan; Patience Jonathan; former ministers of petroleum, Diezani Alison-Madueke and Rilwanu Lukman.
The Nigerian government said the 10 banks are “likely to have processed US dollar transactions connected to P&ID’s operations as either correspondent banks or the New York branches of foreign lenders”.
The Attorney-General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, argued that P&ID could not have operated without paying kickbacks to government officials in over to get away with it’s technical deficiencies.
He said:
“there is good reason to believe that ministers at the highest level were involved in a corrupt scheme to steal money from Nigeria”.
The New York judge, Lorna Schofield, who ruled on the application said that Nigeria’s request was in line with the standards of law, but denied the application to hide it’s findings from P&ID.
The Cable reports that the banks involved are: Citibank, N.A. (Citibank), Allied Irish Banks plc (Allied Irish), HSBC Bank USA (HSBC), Standard New York, Inc. (Standard New York), Deutsche Bank Trust Co. Americas (Deutsche Bank), J.P. Morgan Chase (JPMorgan), United Bank for Africa (UBA), Bank of Cyprus, Fortis Private Banking Singapore Limited (Fortis), and Standard Chartered International (USA) Ltd. (Standard Chartered).
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