by Peter Whoriskey and Agustin Armendariz, Washington Post, Oct. 6, 2021

When three of Africa’s wealthiest people wanted to win favors from the Nigerian oil minister, they didn’t pay cash, according to company filings and court papers describing the alleged transactions. Instead, the oil tycoons arranged to influence her with shell companies, each one holding a valuable piece of London real estate, according to the documents. Other shell companies owned by the oilmen provided the minister and her family with a chauffeured car, and they shipped her luxury furnishings worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, U.S. prosecutors later alleged. With billions in Nigerian oil revenue at stake, the men engaged in “an international conspiracy,” according to U.S. prosecutors, offering millions of dollars’ worth of gifts in exchange for “lucrative business opportunities.”While cash may be the traditional means of providing untraceable gifts to politicians, the very wealthy often turn instead to the offshore world to produce an alternative currency: companies registered in secrecy havens and stuffed with valuable assets. The tycoons who allegedly provided the oil minister with more than $17 million worth of gifts were, according to the court filings and documents, Olajide Omokore and Kolawole Aluko, both previously ranked by Forbes magazine as among the “richest people in Africa,” and Benedict Peters, a man who has been described by Bloomberg and African media as a billionaire.

Peters is identified by name in the Nigerian court filings and as “Co-Conspirator #2” in a forfeiture case by U.S. prosecutors. Through a spokesman, Peters denied dealing in improper benefits and his representatives wrote that one of the key pieces of evidence presented by Nigerian investigators is a “concoction malevolently contrived.” Attorneys for Omokore and Aluko declined to comment. The world’s wealthiest are among the most avid users of offshore companies, a new cache of documents known as the Pandora Papers shows, and they turn to tax and secrecy havens for a variety of reasons. The documents obtained by the International Consortium of Journalists (ICIJ) and shared with The Washington Post and journalists in 117 countries and territories around the world shed light on the Nigerian oil dealings and, in more breadth than was previously possible, the extent to which the world’s wealthy use offshore companies to conduct business.