Nigeria’s former oil minister, Diezani Alison-Madueke, has denied bribery charges by prosecutors in the United Kingdom.
According local media reports on Wednesday, the former minister, who sat in the dock at London’s Southwark Crown Court on the first day of her trial on Tuesday, was accused of multiple counts of bribery between 2011 and 2015, when she was Nigerian Oil Minister under former President Goodluck Jonathan.
The reports stated that the prosecutors told the court that during her tenure as oil minister, those who were interested in “lucrative oil and gas contracts” with Nigeria’s state-owned petroleum corporation provided “significant financial or other advantages” to Alison-Madueke.
The prosecutors added that as a minister, “she should not have accepted benefits from those who were doing, no doubt extremely lucrative, business in oil and gas with government owned entities.”
“We suspect Diezani Alison-Madueke abused her power in Nigeria and accepted financial rewards for awarding multi-million-pound contracts,” the UK National Crime Agency (NCA), which targets international and serious and organised crime, said at the time.
According to the prosecution, .two others, Doye Agama, her brother and Olatimbo Ayinde, are also being prosecuted on bribery charges linked to the case and that the three defendants had a British address at the time of the alleged offences,
The report quoting AFP stated that Judge Justine Thornton said that she hoped that the trial would end by April 24.
Meanwhile, the reports recalled in Nigeria, several properties belonging to the former oil minister and valued at several million dollars were seized by courts in 2017.
The reports also quoted a spokesperson for Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC) confirmed that the agency had “some subsisting cases against the former minister.”
“Alison-Madueke has been on bail since she was first arrested in London in October 2015. She has denied the charges against her.
“In 2023, she was formally charged with accepting bribes,” the reports added.
GIK/APA