Former Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, has dismissed the allegations raised by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission over the recovery of the $322.5 million Abacha loot, calling the claims “baseless, illogical and unsupported by facts.”
Malami, who appeared before the EFCC on Friday, November 28, was later released and given new dates to continue his interrogation. The investigation concerns alleged duplication in the recovery process, as well as accusations of abuse of office and money laundering.
In a statement on Sunday, Malami said the EFCC’s line of inquiry was built on the assumption that a Swiss lawyer, Enrico Monfrini, had already completed the recovery before Malami’s appointment in 2015.
He argued that this position does not stand when compared with documented evidence. He explained that the recovery of stolen funds can only be considered completed once such funds are paid into the Federation Account. He added that by 2016, when the Buhari administration revisited the issue, no such payment had been received.
Malami said several lawyers, including Monfrini, applied in December 2016 seeking to be contracted for the recovery, which he said contradicts the narrative that the matter had already been settled years earlier.
He revealed that Monfrini demanded an upfront fee of $5 million and a 40 per cent success fee, which he later reduced to 20 per cent. Malami noted that the government rejected these terms because its policy prohibited upfront payments and limited fees to a maximum of 5 per cent.
He explained that a Nigerian law firm was eventually engaged on a 5 per cent success fee, which saved the country between 15 and 35 per cent of the recovered funds, amounting to tens of billions of naira at today’s exchange rate.
Malami clarified that the Abacha funds repatriated under his tenure were received in separate batches.
The first was $322.5 million returned from Switzerland between 2017 and 2018, which was used for Conditional Cash Transfers under the National Social Investment Programme and monitored by the World Bank and civil society organisations.
The second was $321 million repatriated from Jersey in 2020 and allocated to major infrastructure projects such as the Lagos–Ibadan Expressway, Abuja–Kano Road and the Second Niger Bridge.
He stressed that attempts to merge the separate tranches or suggest that the recovery was duplicated do not align with the facts.
Malami insisted that all his actions as Attorney General were carried out “transparently and in the public interest,” adding that the allegations against him have no reasonable basis.
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