[Apropos people wondering what anyone sees in sending out those ridiculous Nigerian emails]
Financial Times; Aug 24, 2002
Victims pursue alleged fraudsters in Nigeria By Michael Peel in Lagos
The Nigerian press will next week carry an unusual series of full-page advertisements placed on behalf of the victims of an alleged $190m international fraud and money laundering operation.
Former shareholders of Banco Noroeste, a Brazilian bank, are using leading newspapers to publicise a British court judgment this month that they should be paid $150m over a deception allegedly perpetrated by the late Ikechukwu Anajemba, a Nigerian businessman, and his wife Amaka.
The High Court judgment points to the likely existence of a massive fraud perpetrated by a type of trickster notorious in Nigeria that has caused great damage to the country's international image. "No one can doubt, looking at the detailed documents here, of [the existence of] a sophisticated money laundering operation," wrote Justice Jacob. "Every individual who received that money must have known that their receipt was illegitimate."
The decision is a response to investor litigation launched after Spain's Santander group bought Banco Noroeste in 1998 and noticed the alleged misappropriation of $242m. The judgment outlines how most of the stolen money was allegedly removed from Banco Noroeste via payments from the bank's Cayman Island branch authorised by Nelson Sakaguchi, a former official of the bank now in prison in Switzerland.
The shareholders' evidence includes a series of letters, sent to Mr Sakaguchi between 1995 and 1998, that falsely claim to be from the Central Bank of Nigeria and other arms of the country's government.
The claimants say the letters, which offer a series of investment opportunities in projects such as airport construction, are part of an "advance fee" fraud offering large future returns in exchange for down payments.
Peters & Peters, one of an international group of law firms acting for the claimants, says its clients have arranged for the adverts to appear in the Nigerian newspapers as a way of serving notice on defendants who have proved reluctant to comply with previous court demands.
"They have acted in serial default of the orders made against them," says Keith Oliver, head of the fraud and commercial litigation section at Peters & Peters. "[They] demonstrated that they had no intention whatsoever of complying with the disclosure and other requirements applied as a consequence of their conduct."
The alleged method of the crime will be familiar to international business people who have been the targets of similar "419" scams - named after the section of the Nigerian criminal code that deals with this type of fraud.
The letters, often sent by e-mail, generally promise big rewards in exchange for providing funds either to invest in a corrupt deal or to help in the transfer of stolen public money out of Nigeria.
The British court judgment and the Nigerian newspaper publicity is a relatively rare example of the alleged perpetrators of a 419 fraud being tracked down and forced to explain their actions.