The All Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential Campaign Council has accused the presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Atiku Abubakar, of a history of alleged corruption, saying he would compromise Nigeria’s interests for personal gain. 

Spokesperson for the ruling party’s PCC, Dele Alake, disclosed this in a statement on Friday, in reaction to a recent arbitration tribunal ruling of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) in Paris, France, linking Mr Abubakar with an illegal power contract with Sunrise Power and Transmission Company Limited, during his time as vice president.

Quoting the ruling, Mr Alake said the ICC Paris tribunal concluded that, “There is a close connection in time between the moment the $500,000 payment was made to the wife of Vice-President Abubakar on 30 January 2003 and the alleged award of the BOT contract to Sunrise on 22 May 2003.”

Mr Alake, the incumbent Minister of Solid Minerals, said Mr Abubakar “is unfit to be President of Nigeria because he has once again proven he will compromise Nigeria’s best interests for personal, fiduciary gain.”

The minister said Mr Abubakar’s “legendary corruption” reverberated at the tribunal hearings in the arbitration filed by Sunrise Power and Leno Adesanya over the stalled 3960mw Mambila Hydroelectric Power Project in Taraba State, which he said revealed that Mr Abubakar and former power minister, Olu Agunloye, worked in cahoots to sign the illegal contract.

Mr Alake said, “The backdoor signing of the contract in the dying days of then President Olusegun Obasanjo’s first term, when Atiku wielded enormous power, put Nigeria in a serious financial peril, despite President Obasanjo’s objection and reservations at the Federal Executive Council meeting. 

“Atiku’s greed, however, propelled him to disobey the council and President Obasanjo, months after Leno Adesanya, through an offshore account, China Castle Investment, wired $500,000 to the U.S. Citibank account of his now-divorced wife, Jennifer Douglas. 

“The money arrived in tranches, raising red flags at Citibank and in the United States. The wired money and other suspicious transfers totalling $40 million surfaced in a U.S. Senate investigation into Atiku and other corrupt leaders. In the U.S. Senate report titled Keeping Foreign Corruption out of the United States: Four Case Histories, Jennifer said her husband sent the money. She said she was not familiar with the offshore company that wired the money.”

He stated that Mr Abubakar’s “treasonable act”, after the Nigerian government declined to go ahead with the illegal contract, led Sunrise and Mr Adesanya to make a claim against the country by demanding $680 million as a settlement sum and interest in respect of another arbitration in which it is claiming over $2.7 billion in compensation and interest relating to disputes associated with the development of the Mambilla Hydro Power project.

“Nigeria fought valiantly to dodge this huge liability, echoing a similar attempt by another rogue company, Process and Industrial Development (P&ID), to extract an $11 billion claim from our country for a phantom gas project in Akwa Ibom that the company did not spend a dime on.

“By collecting a $500,000 bribe from Leno Adesanya to approve a build-operate-transfer contract to a company with no scintilla of experience in hydro power generation, Atiku has proven he is one of the enablers of local and international predatory and exploitative entities out to defraud our country.

“At the hearing in Paris, Atiku, to avoid embarrassment, chose to stay away to give evidence in support of Sunrise and Leno Adesanya’s specious claim that the $500,000 was a foreign exchange transaction. Although the tribunal requested Atiku’s witness statement, Adesanya shielded Atiku and Jennifer Douglas by lying. In contrast, President Olusegun Obasanjo and President Muhammadu Buhari went to Paris to defend Nigeria and help stave off a liability that our country can ill-afford to redeem in these lean times.”

According to Mr Alake, the ruling in Paris again justified Mr Obasanjo’s scathing remarks about Mr Abubakar’s corruption, in the second part of his book, “My Watch. What I did not know”. 

The APC Campaign therefore called on Mr Abubakar to do himself a rare honour by bowing out of the 2027 presidential race, because the $500,000 bribe is just the tip of the iceberg of the revelations to come about his monumental corruption.

Mr Alake said Mr Abubakar plans to bamboozle his way to the presidency as a pro-petrol-subsidy advocate, but was among those responsible for stalling the kick-off of what would have been the country’s biggest hydro-power project, with many economic spin-offs for the people of Taraba State.