THE collapse this week of a major fraud trial in Nigeria’s capital Abuja is a considerable disappoint to investigators who have worked hard for five years to bring to book one of the most outrageous of Nigeria’s many deplorable scams. This particular con trick involved a promise to the head of international finance at a Brazilian Bank that he would receive a $10 million kickback if he would use his bank’s funds to finance a new airport in Nigeria. The airport of course never existed and as a result the corrupt executive sent off $242 million of his bank’s money to various international accounts from which it then disappeared.
In a technical decision, a high court judge in Abuja decided that since the offenses had taken place in Lagos, it was the former not the new capital that had the jurisdiction. With Nigeria’s federal constitution, this is probably correct. Unfortunately it will send the wrong message to international investigators who may suspect Nigeria is disinclined the stamp out this criminal conspiracy which, in the last decade, has grown substantially.
Among Nigeria’s forthright and often outspoken press, while there is little approval for the fraudsters, there is some amusement at the extent to which these scams regularly exploit the greed, gullibility and dishonesty of often apparently well-informed individuals around the world who really ought to know better.
Con artists, usually Nigerian, send out proposals daily to e-mail lists numbering thousands. Some play upon the recipient’s sympathy — classically a bequest is stuck in a trunk in a bonded warehouse and the writer needs a sum of money to fund its release or pay the fees of a lawyer. Others however speak of stolen funds or deposits whose owner is dead and for which there is no legal claimant which need the use of a third-party account to “launder” them. In return for this simple facility, the owner of the third-party account will be most generously rewarded. Of course once any account details are handed to the criminals, the account is generously pillaged.
We may share with Nigerian press columnists the pleasant irony of someone who is perfectly prepared to participate in a transaction that defrauds someone else complaining when they discover that in fact it is they themselves that have been defrauded.
What seems remarkable however is that so few of these fraudsters have yet been brought to book. It may be that the ability to trace their e-mails and the transfers of funds that they trick out of greedy dupes is being hampered by the far greater concentration of the world’s intelligence systems on the war against international terror. There are simply not enough resources to monitor and track their transactions. There certainly ought to be the will, since these blatant criminals can no longer be allowed to operate. In this respect it really must be hoped that the trial so painstakingly prepared by Nigerian prosecutors for the court in Abuja will now go ahead in Lagos.
It is one thing to make an ass of a greedy would-be cheat. It is quite another to make an ass of the law.
