CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

Dirty Money at Work 61
Until the late 1990s, Nigeria had a succession of increasingly corrupt
military regimes that began in 1966, broken only by a four-year return to
equally corrupt civilian rule in the mid-1970s. By the mid-1980s, it was
clear that when a general ascended to head of state he was expected to leave
the dirty business of drugs to lesser officers and concentrate his larceny on
loftier means of enrichment. Abacha followed suit. In 1993 he forced out a
weak, three-month-old, interim government and took over the country, thus
placing Nigeria’s huge oil revenues at his disposal.
A portion of the nation’s two-million-plus barrels per day oil production,
arising from joint ventures with foreign corporations, is allocated
to the federal government. Heads of state awarded “lifting” contracts
(purchase rights) to members of the elite whose support they valued. A
low purchase price paid to the government accommodated large profits
on sales to foreign buyers, generating huge margins out of which
multimillion-dollar kickbacks were deposited into foreign bank accounts.
Marc Rich’s Swiss trading company, Glencore, allegedly was a frequent
intermediary. 13
Even as one of the world’s largest oil producers and with four local petroleum
refineries, Nigeria had to import diesel fuel, jet fuel, and gasoline.
Abacha starved the refineries of maintenance funds, cutting their combined
output to a fraction of capacity, so that products had to be purchased
abroad. By the tanker-loads, hundreds of millions of gallons of usually offquality
fuel were brought in mainly from European refineries, at markups as
much as 400 percent above world market prices. This became one of
Abacha’s most prized sources of graft, draining hundreds of millions of dollars
from state revenues.
Finally, Abacha entered that elite group of rogues who had the power to
direct the central bank to deliver currency straight out of the national treasury.
Locked trunks and canvas bags containing millions in dollars and
pounds often showed up late at night at Abacha’s various residences. Ferdinand
Marcos of the Philippines and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire did the
same thing.
When he took over the presidency of Nigeria in 1993, Abacha’s ambition
seemed to be to stay in office longer and steal more money than any of his
predecessors. He was well on the road to success when unexpectedly in 1998
he succumbed during an orgy with two other generals and three prostitutes