A former staff of Swiss-based oil trader, Glencore, a company that has been awarded several crude lifting contracts by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, (NNPC), Anthony Stimler, has confessed that he paid bribes to intermediaries on the understanding that it would be passed on to its officials to influence the governments crude oil allocation during Diezani Alison Maduekes tenure as petroleum minister.
Stimler, currently helping U.S. Justice Department investigators into the company and former colleagues, said for a dozen years, he had paid millions in bribes to African officials and intermediaries, according to a Bloomberg report.
According to a transcript of his guilty plea, Stimler told a federal judge in New York, that, When I made requests for payments to intermediaries, I was aware that other Glencore traders who worked with me were doing the same thing by directing our intermediaries to make bribe payments to government officials.
I intended that a proportion of the payment to intermediaries operating in Nigeria were to be passed on to Nigerian State-owned oil company officials. The purpose of the payment was to influence those officials decisions regarding the Nigerian governments allocations of crude oil cargo”.
Most of these fraudulent transactions occurred when Madueke presided as petroleum minister during the administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan.
According to US prosecutors, two associates of the minister set up companies shortly after she took office and were awarded contracts to sell large allotments of oil on global markets.
The pair were awarded dozens of crude cargoes worth about $1.5 billion, according to the prosecutors. Nigeria received little of the proceeds of those sales, which prosecutors say were diverted for Madueke and her associates.
They say that over the course of 2013 and 2014, Glencore bought 15 cargoes totaling 7 million barrels from the men, paying more than $800 million. Of that, they contend, roughly a third – $272 million – was diverted into an account at a Nigerian bank used for the purchases for the former minister.
According to the Bloomberg reports, Stimlers career with Glencore began in 1998, where he rose through the ranks, becoming head of its West African oil trading desk. He presided over a robust expansion of its crude flows and a nearly doubling of his desks annual profits to nearly $200 million in 2017.
In that same year, 2017, prosecutors from the Justice Departments kleptocracy team filed a case in Houston to seize nearly $145 million worth of assets – including an $80 million, a 215-foot yacht called the Galactica Star, a $50 million Billionaires Row apartment in New York and homes in California – which it said were purchased for the benefit of Nigerias oil minister, Diezani Alison-Madueke, with embezzled funds.
Stimler has implicated 7 others, including at least four Glencore traders, in making bribe payments, and authorities say the scheme started before him.
Following Buharis election in 2015, Diezani fled Nigeria and has been living in London. She has been charged with corruption by Nigerian authorities but has so far successfully evaded extradition, while she is under investigation by U.K. authorities as well.
