Opl245 bribe, the revelations of the British 007 at the ENI trial

[by Luca Manes] published on Valori.it

The eighth hearing of the OPL 245 trial, alas, begins badly: the prosecution witness, traveling from Macedonia, is late. And, what's more, the lawyer of Eni manager Vincenzo Armanna cannot be found. As if that wasn't enough, we are once again relegated to a secondary classroom. Luckily it is no longer so hot and a part of the public makes a virtue of necessity and places themselves in the cage intended for the accused guests of their homeland's prisons.

After more than half an hour of waiting spent debating procedural issues and compiling the calendar of the next hearings - practically one every Wednesday between now and the end of November - Armanna's lawyer is replaced by a colleague and Mister Jonathan Benton introduces himself and so we begin with an extremely stimulating and instructive interrogation.

Two crucial arrests

He was one of the leading exponents of the Proceeds of Corruption Unit of the London Metropolitan Police (now merged into the National Crime Agency). He left the force a year ago, but at the time of the investigation into OPL 245 in England he was at the top of the investigative activity.

It was Benton who arrested two Nigerian citizens, Gabriel Oziegbe and Umar Bature, in January 2014 for walking around London with bags of "dirty" money. The cue had come a few days earlier from the Anglo-Israeli lawyer Jefrey Tesler, who showed up at the police station with a suitcase bulging with money, 378 thousand pounds. Oziegbe and Bature instead had 70 thousand pounds and 50 thousand dollars respectively in their backpacks.

Lawyer Tesler had already been convicted of corruption and claimed that that river of banknotes "belonged" to the former Nigerian oil minister Dan Etete, in fact the one who had sold the very rich oil license to Eni and Shell.

The gory details of the Cavendish Hotel

Benton did not skimp on the details: one of the Nigerian gentlemen, Umar Bature, had stayed over a week at the Cavendish Hotel, as demonstrated, among other things, by receipts and used condoms (sic!), while not even Western Union, which had received the money, could establish its exact origin. Tesler's words tell us that this episode constitutes one of the pieces of the very complicated OPL 245 puzzle, but no official document. At least at present. Side note, not exactly unimportant, Mr. Bature was a member of the Nigerian Parliament.

The pressure to cover everything up

The former English super-policeman provided a very illustrative insight into the context within which the investigations had taken place, narrating his meetings with the former head of Nigeria's anti-corruption unit Ibrahim Lamode and the former Minister of Justice Mohammed Adoke.

Both had made him understand that, in the Abuja area, the investigation into OPL 245 would get nowhere, because there was "pressure from above", i.e. directly from the then president Goodluck Jonathan, to cover everything up.

The meeting between Benton and Adoke was highly irregular, organized by surprise and without caring about protocol: "a minister does not meet in that way with a person who is not even remotely his equal in rank" the Englishman insisted.

Adoke knew that Etete had purchased the license for a paltry fraction of its real value and that therefore the whole operation was suspicious. In reality he was also suspicious, given that one of the many streams of money linked to the payment of the potential mega-bribe of 1.1 billion dollars given by Eni and Shell had also passed through the current account of one of his relatives.

Witness or suspect?

Precisely the status of the former minister - was he under investigation or not? How should your chat with Benton be considered, an interrogation or not? – triggered the counter-offensive of Eni's lawyers and Roberto Casula (number two of the Six-Legged Dog, now on leave and also involved in the other investigation into alleged corruption in the Republic of Congo). The president of the court Marco Tremolada had Benton's interrogation completed, reserving the possibility of excluding or excluding from the evidence the part concerning the Adoke-Benton meeting.

Next week, the video conference with FBI agent Debra Laprevotte awaits us, another "not to be missed" step in the trial of the century.