Jailed former Delta State Governor, James Ibori

Jailed former Delta State Governor, James Ibori, told a Swiss private bank in 2004 that he owned 30 per cent of oil firm, Oando Plc, which allegedly paid $1.2m into his account that year, a prosecutor told a British court on Tuesday. The court also heard that PKB Privatbank had in an internal document likened Ibori to a scion of the Kennedy dynasty in the United States, according to a report by Reuters. Ibori was jailed for 13 years in Britain after pleading guilty in February 2012 to 10 counts of fraud and money-laundering worth £50m ($79.5m). Prosecutors said his total wealth was likely to be far greater than that. Details of his assets and how he kept them hidden from the public gaze through a web of shell companies and foreign bank accounts are being disclosed as part of a three-week confiscation hearing, which began in London on Monday. One of the  biggest  embezzlement cases seen in Britain, Ibori’s is also a rare example of a senior politician being held to account for the corruption that has held back Nigeria. Prosecutor Sasha Wass told Southwark Crown Court on Tuesday that in 2004, Ibori had opened an account at Lugano-based PKB in the name of a shell company called Stanhope Investments. Quoting from internal PKB documents, Wass told the court that Ibori had presented himself to the bank as the owner of an insurance company, half of a bank and 30 per cent of Oando. She said that a total of $1.2m flowed into the PKB account from Oando in three payments that year, which had later been channelled to other accounts and were part of funds intended for the purchase of a $20m private jet. Shares in Oando, Nigeria’s biggest home-grown oil company, fell by 10 per cent in Lagos on Tuesday following the first allegation by Wass on Monday that Ibori had hidden assets in the firm. Oando said on Monday that Ibori had only an “insignificant” holding in the firm and also said it had sold $2.7m of its foreign exchange earnings for naira in 2004 to a company that later turned out to be controlled by Ibori, but it did not know that at the time. Wass told the court on Tuesday that despite his assets being restrained in 2008, Ibori had after that date continued to live a lavish lifestyle, travel and pay fees to the English boarding school where his three children were being educated. Combined with Ibori’s track record of hiding his assets, this led to the “irresistible inference” that he had further hidden assets, which investigators had not yet uncovered, she said, adding that one option of where these might be was Oando. Wass also quoted from an internal PKB report from 2004, which said Ibori came from one of a few families that had for decades developed the oil industry in the country. “We could compare these families with the Kennedy dynasty, which also mixed business and politics,” the bank document said. Another excerpt said Ibori was “an extremely rich man as he was doing a lot of business before becoming governor.” PKB, which is fully owned by the Luxembourg-listed Compagnie de l’Occident pour la Finance et l’Industrie, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In the early 1990s, Ibori worked as a cashier at Wickes, a home improvement chain store in London. He was convicted of theft in 1991 after being caught taking money from the till. A property he and his wife had bought in a London suburb was repossessed as the couple could not meet mortgage payments. The Head, Corporate Communications, Oando Plc, Mr. Ainojie Irune, who spoke with The PUNCH over the telephone, said the company’s position on the matter remained the same as stated on Monday that Ibori did not own a large part of the compan by @UC Browser