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NLNG
Contract: I
received money from Halliburton � MD Yusuf
By
Uchenna Awom
National
Assembly
Correspondent,
Abuja
Mohammed
Dikko Yusuf, former board Chairman of the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas
(NLNG), admitted on Wednesday that he received money several times from
Jeffrey Tesler and Gilbert Chagoury but only after the contract on the
plant was awarded.
He
was testifying in Abuja at the enquiry by the House of Representatives
into the bribery allegation against TSKJ consortium, an affiliate of US
oil service company Halliburton.
Yusuf,
a former Inspector General of Police, is also Chairman of the Movement for
Democracy and Justice (MDJ) party.
While
he made his admission, National Chairman of the All Nigeria Peoples Party
(ANPP) and former Petroleum and Mineral Resources Minister Don Etiebet,
who also testified at the hearing, said he was sidelined in the award of
the contract in September 1994 and as such was not involved in the bribery
scandal which influenced it.
TSKJ
is a private limited liability company registered in Madeira, Portugal. It
comprises Technip of France, Snamprogetti Netherlands, an affiliate of the
Italian group ENI, JGC Corporation of Japan and Kellogg Brown and Root,
(which was acquired by Halliburton in 1998), and is being investigated by
the House for allegedly paying off unnamed Nigerian officials with $178
million through Tesler to win the $2.5 billion contract to construct the
gas terminal in Bonny.
Yusuf
testified on oath before the House Committee on Public Petition. He
absolved Etiebet and former Head of State Ernest Shonekan of influencing the award of the
contract in any way, and insisted that he received the money from Tesler
two years after the contract was awarded in 1997 and 1998, which could not
have influenced the transaction.
Though
Yusuf did not explain why the money was given to him, he told the
lawmakers that he had known both Tesler and Chagoury since the
1980�s.
According
to him, the contract was transparently done, until there erupted an
internal squabble within the TSKJ consortium on who does which work on the
site.
He
added that the board at that time was not a government agency and was not
obliged to take instructions from the government, but he admitted that he
was answerable to late Head of State Sani Abacha.
�It
was a condition I gave Etiebet before I took up the job, that going by the
article of association of the company, it was not a parastatal; as such we
should be allowed to perform our functions unhindered�, he
said.
Etiebet
corroborated this claim. He said Yusuf may have taken advantage of his
closeness to Abacha to take direct instructions from him on matters that
related to the plant, adding that he had to end his journey in London in
protest as he could not continue to the Hague, the Netherlands for the
contract signing ceremony because he felt that the process was
faulty.
He
stated that his position was informed by some persons who sought to see
him at his hotel in London in September 1994, on his way to the
Hague.
Etiebet
explained that one of them, nicknamed �London Weather�, claimed to be
working for TSKJ, but that he refused to meet him until he disclosed his
real identity. The man declined.
By
then Yusuf was already in the Hague where the contract was signed. Etiebet
said he returned to Nigeria to protest to Abacha who asked him to hold on,
until �the Chairman� returned for more discussions on the
matter.
The hearing continues
today with submissions from officials of TSKJ and the Nigerian National
Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).
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