Three children of Sambo Dasuki, including his teenage sons, kept secret assets in tax havens when he served as National Security Adviser….
Three children of Sambo Dasuki, including his teenage sons, kept secret assets in tax havens when he served as National Security Adviser.
This was exposed by Pandora Papers, a project led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), and which Premium Times is a part of.
According to the investigation, Nigerian multi-billionaire businessman, Leno Adesanya, in 2013 approached a secrecy seller in the British Virgin Islands, Trident Trust Company Limited, to help family members of Dasuki register a shell company, Hydropower Investments Limited.
In the documentation submitted for the company’s incorporation, Adesanya indicated that Hydropower Investment was set up to own real estate and investment portfolios.
The businessman also indicated that the company would, on behalf of the Dasuki family, hold 1.5 million shares in Sino Africa (Nigeria) Limited, a 19-year old company that has him (Adesanya) and a certain Uche Nwokedi as directors.
Hydropower Investments, company documents also showed, will also hold for the Dasukis 10 million shares in Sunrise Power & Transmission (Nigeria) Co. Limited, a company that is locked in a long-drawn dispute with the Nigerian government over the Mambilla power project.
The legal dispute is stalling the key funding from the Chinese EXIM Bank to execute the Mambilla project, an ambitious electricity generation infrastructure considered key to tackling Nigeria’s long-standing power sector crisis.
The shell company, Hydropower Investments, was registered on November 14, 2013, with Adesanya and Abubakar Atiku Dasuki, a son of the former NSA, as directors.
But while Adesanya served as the face of the company and used his Lagos home as the contact address for the offshore firm, he held no single share.
The shareholders and ultimate beneficial owners of the company are Abubakar Atiku Dasuki, (17,000 shares), Hassan Sultan Dasuki (16,500 shares) and Asmau Iman Dasuki (16,500 shares).
Abubakar was 31 years old at the time the company was established while Hassan and Asmau were 18.
The three shareholders are children of former NSA Dasuki, one of the most powerful figures in Nigeria at the time the company was incorporated, and awarded a combined 11.5million shares in Adesanya’s companies — Sunrise and Sino Africa.
There is no evidence that Dasuki or his children paid for the shares. When the registration agent, Trident Trust Company, sought to know how the shareholders sourced the funds with which they planned to acquire the assets, Adesanya simply provided a vague response, telling them the assets would be “carried interest through a loan to be arranged by the sponsor (Leno Adesanya) of the project.”
The second business logjam that Adesanya battled to resolve during the Jonathan administration concerned the $6billion Mambilla power project which was awarded to his company, Sunrise Powers and Transmission Company Limited, but which later became the subject of an intense business dispute and power play.
The Mambilla power project, first conceived in the 1970s and expected to produce 3,050 megawatts of electricity, has stalled owing to controversies surrounding the award of the contract to Sunrise Power.
The award was sequel to a 2003 agreement under the Olusegun Obasanjo-led administration to construct the 3,050MW plant in Mambilla, Taraba State, on a build, operate and transfer basis.
The Jonathan government, in which Dasuki played a prominent role, worked very hard to resolve the logjam.
It is unclear if Dasuki offered Adesanya and his company help in any way. But it was within that period – November 2013 – that Adesanya discreetly incorporated Hydropower Investments for the Dasukis and then awarded them 10 million shares in Sunrise Power and another 1.5 million shares in another of his companies — Sino Africa.
However, after the Jonathan government left office, the legal tussle returned and has remained unresolved, again stalling the execution of the Mambilla project.
Adesanya. speaking through his representative, said he derived no favours from Dasuki and added that “the children wanted to start doing business and they were advised by me to set up an offshore company for discretionary purposes.”
Responding to an inquiry, Dasuki said, through a representative, he did not ask Adesanya to register the company for his children. He said business people sometimes render unsolicited favours to government officials even without their knowledge.
He added that, moreover, his children were adults, who could make business decisions on their own.
EXPOSED: How Stella Oduah Paid N5 Billion Cash For London Mansions
Pandora Papers, one of the biggest leaks of financial documents in the world, has uncovered how Senator Stella Oduah secretly acquired mansions in London….
Pandora Papers, one of the biggest leaks of financial documents in the world, has uncovered how Senator Stella Oduah secretly acquired mansions in London.
According to investigation led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, including more than 600 journalists, some from PREMIUM TIMES, seven London properties are connected to Oduah.
One of the properties is said to be in her name, two through her Nigerian-incorporated firm, and four secretly through her Seychelles offshore company.
International Trading and Logistics Company Limited (ITCL) was incorporated in Seychelles, a commonly used secrecy and tax haven, with Oduah as the ultimate beneficial owner.
She reportedly used the company to acquire the four London properties worth a total of 6.7 million pounds between October 2012 and August 2013.
At the time, Oduah was a minister in the government of ex-President Goodluck Jonathan.
She served as Minister of Aviation between 2011 and 2014 when she was fired over massive corruption scandal.
Oduah was indicted by two panels, which probed the purchase of two bullet-proof cars by the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), an agency under her supervision, for N255 million in violation of Nigeria’s public procurement and appropriation laws.
According to the UK Land Registry records, on October 19, 2012, ITCL bought a house at 23 St Edmunds Terrace, London, NW8 7QA for 5.3 million pounds.
Then, in the following year, 2013, between August 6 and 15, the following three more properties were bought in the name of ITCL:
Bought: on or around 06/08/2013
Price paid: £378,000.
* Flat 2, 7 Devonshire Terrace, London (W2 3DN)
Bought: on or around 06/08/2013
Price paid: £378,000.
* Top Floor Flat, 89 Brondesbury Villas, London (NW6 6AG)
Bought: on or around 12/08/2013
Price paid: £369,000.
* Fourth Floor Flat, 19 Warrington Crescent, London (W9 1ED)
Bought: on or around 15/08/2013
Price paid: £680,000.
“Records show that none of the four properties was bought with mortgage financing, meaning Ms Oduah secretly routed 6.7 million pounds through her offshore company to anonymously effect the acquisitions.”
“Ms Oduah’s houses are among the 234 U.K. properties our collaborative investigation showed were anonymously acquired by offshore companies, with Nigerians as ultimate beneficial owners. The investigation exposed the hidden identities of the true owners of the properties bought in the so-called envelope structure that offers confidentiality benefits, which in the case of Nigeria public servants like Ms Oduah, mean a way of blocking the Code of Conduct Bureau from knowing undeclared assets,” PREMIUM TIMES said in its report.
Before her acquisition of the above four properties, Oduah had bought in her own name, on March 8, 2006, Apartment 209, Cavendish House, 31 Monck Street, London SW1P 2AS for 700 thousand pounds, Land Registry record shows.
On September 14, 2012, about one month before the purchase of the 5.3 million pounds Edmund Terrace property, SPGCL wired $71,973 bank transfer to Daniel Ford & Co., a UK property agency commonly used by Nigerian business and political elites investing in the UK property market anonymously, according to a leaked suspicious activity report submitted by Deutsche Bank to the U.S. financial intelligence agency FinCEN.
Deutsche Bank had helped facilitate the U.S. dollar transfer, acting as a correspondent bank. Reporting that Oduah is the owner of SPGCL in its suspicious activity report, Deutsche Bank reportedly said it suspected the payment to Daniel Ford was money laundering.
Meanwhile, as she used ITCL Seychelles, she also invested in the UK property market through ITCL Nigeria, also while serving as minister. On July 12, 2011, just days after her assumption of office as aviation minister, she used ITCL Nigeria to buy Flats 303 and 306 Grant House, 90 Liberty Street, London SW9 0BZ for 475 thousand pounds each.
The newspaper said the senator, who defected from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the All Progressives Congress (APC) in August, did not respond to inquiries on the issue.
Oduah currently represents Anambra North at the upper chamber of Nigeria’s National Assembly.
BUY SLAY NETWORK NFTs on BITCLOUT
Sources Daily Trust , Daily Trust
The line has been drawn yet no one is reprimanded!
