VIENNA— AUSTRIA, Britain and five other European nations have for four years failed to agree to help Nigeria recover money that disappeared during the rule of the late General Sani Abacha, Nigeria’s ambassador to Vienna said yesterday. Ambassador Biodun Owoseni said Nigeria had since 2000 been trying to recover $3.5 billion (2.6 billion euros) that was stolen from the state during the Abacha regime and mostly found its way to Europe.
"The funds are traceable to 10 countries of which only three have responded positively— Belgium, Jersey Island and Switzerland. We have recovered just under two billion dollars from Belgium," he said, stressing that the other states to which money flowed, were often countries to which Nigeria serviced huge debts, but struggled to do exactly because so much money had been looted from state coffers.
"Most of the money is stashed in western European countries. They are members of the London and Paris Clubs. We are indebted to these countries to the tune of 60 per cent of our GDP. These are the same countries harbouring assets and we need this back, countries like this, countries like Britain," the ambassador said, adding that there was "a direct link between asset recovery and development."
Owoseni spoke at the launch of a United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) initiative to help Nigeria and Kenya recover stolen state assets on the first anniversary of the UN Convention Against Corruption.
UNODC executive director, Antonio Maria Costa, said the body would assess the legal and institutional frameworks in those two countries and advise them on overcoming obstacles to asset recovery. He said UNODC estimated that Kenya lost more than three billion dollars in state funding through corruption in the 1990s and that in Nigeria a total of $2.2 billion was stolen and another $5.5 billion embezzled, adding: "The number is so bloody big."
He said international cooperation was the biggest problem facing countries trying to recover stolen state funds and that the convention was a breakthrough in that it obligated member states to help each other in this quest. So far 114 member states have signed the convention but only 13 have ratified it and can only enter into force once 30 states do so.
President Olusegun Obasanjo launched a clean-up operation after coming to power in 1999 and Kenya has been trying to weed out corrupt officials and probe financial scandals since President Daniel Arap Moi retired in 2002.
Last month, a Kenyan court ordered Moi and some 1,500 others to testify before a public inquiry into the Goldenberg scandal, a fictitious export scheme which cost Kenyans anything from hundreds of millions to around three billion dollars.
