Paris ICC Arbitration Court Ruling Proves That Atiku Is Unfit to Lead Nigeria – APC

Atiku Abubakar, the African Democratic Congress candidate, is unfit to be President of Nigeria because he has once again proven he will compromise Nigeria’s best interests for personal, fiduciary gain.

Abubakar’s legendary corruption reverberated in Paris at the International Arbitration Tribunal under the auspices of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). Hearings in the arbitration filed by Sunrise Power and Transmission Company Ltd (Sunrise) and Leno Adesanya over the stalled 3960mw Mambila Hydroelectric Power Project in Taraba State revealed that Abubakar and former power minister Olu Agunloye worked in cahoots to sign an illegal power contract with Sunrise.

The backdoor signing of the contract in the dying days of then President Olusegun Obasanjo’s first term, when Atiku wielded enormous power, put Nigeria in a serious financial peril, despite President Obasanjo’s objection and reservations at the Federal Executive Council meeting.

Atiku’s greed, however, propelled him to disobey the council and President Obasanjo, months after Leno Adesanya, through an offshore account, China Castle Investment, wired $500,000 to the US Citibank account of his now-divorced wife, Jennifer Douglas. The money arrived in tranches, raising red flags at Citibank and in the United States. The wired money and other suspicious transfers totalling $40 million surfaced in a US Senate investigation into Atiku and other corrupt leaders. In the US Senate report titled “Keeping Foreign Corruption out of the United States: Four Case Histories”, Jennifer said her husband sent the money. She said she was not familiar with the offshore company that wired the money.

Atiku’s treasonable act, after the Nigerian government declined to go ahead with the illegal contract, led Sunrise and Leno Adesanya to make a claim against the Federal Republic of Nigeria, demanding $680 million as a settlement sum and interest in respect of another arbitration in which it is claiming over $2.7 billion in compensation and interest relating to disputes associated with the development of the Mambilla Hydro Power project.

As the ICC Paris Tribunal concluded: “There is a close connection in time between the moment the USD 500,000 payment was made to the wife of Vice-President Abubakar on 30 January 2003 and the alleged award of the BOT contract to Sunrise on 22 May 2003.”

Nigeria fought valiantly to dodge this huge liability, echoing a similar attempt by another rogue company, Process and Industrial Development (P&ID), to extract an $11 billion claim from our country for a phantom gas project in Akwa Ibom that the company did not spend a dime on.

By collecting a $500,000 bribe from Leno Adesanya to approve a Build-Operate-Transfer contract to a company with no scintilla of experience in hydro power generation, Atiku has proven he is one of the enablers of local and international predatory and exploitative entities out to defraud our country.

At the hearing in Paris, Atiku, to avoid embarrassment, chose to stay away to give evidence in support of Sunrise and Leno Adesanya’s specious claim that the $500,000 was a foreign exchange transaction. Although the Tribunal requested Atiku’s witness statement, Adesanya shielded Atiku and Jennifer Douglas by lying. In contrast, President Olusegun Obasanjo and President Muhammadu Buhari went to Paris to defend Nigeria and help stave off a liability that our country can ill-afford to redeem in these lean times.