NIGERIAN BILLIONAIRE FINGERED IN DRUG CARTEL INVESTIGATIONS

MBABANE - Central Bank of Swaziland Governor Majozi Sithole says information obtained from the internet implicated Nigerian billionaire Chief Benjamin Aghalieaku Arinze in a drug cartel investigation.

According to the governor, this was one of the reasons which resulted in Central Bank of Swaziland directing Nedbank Swaziland Limited to freeze a bank account of Arinze’s local company trading as Aghalieaku Airways pending investigations. Sithole also highlighted that another thing which raised suspicions was that the destination of the funds was Panama City, which was recently published as a suspected destination for illicit flow of funds. He disclosed this in a letter he wrote to the Anti- Corruption Commission (ACC) where he was asking it to institute some investigations on the  transactions made by the  Nigerian businessman’s company in Swaziland.
Sithole also mentioned that another reason was that the two shareholders of the company were Nigerian citizens, a country known for having a lot of swindlers. These are allegations whose veracity is yet to be determined.
According to the governor, the Central Bank of Swaziland received an application from Nedbank Swaziland to approve remittance of funds to Panama on behalf of Arinze’s local company trading as Aghalieaku Airways, being a deposit of a leased plane.

He highlighted that as per the procedure they (Central Bank of Swaziland) requested for the company registration documents which was prerequisite documentation to enable proper assessment of the application. Sithole highlighted that an analysis of the application revealed the following ‘red flags’:  The company account was funded through cash deposited over the counter of E621 510 within three days, cash deposit fee for transactions totalled to E14 452.23, which normal businesspeople would go out of their way to avoid given the availability of cheaper options for depositing funds like electronic funds transfer. Sithole mentioned that advanced payments in Exchange Control field were commonly used for illicit flow of funds and this required thorough probing in cases where there was a reason to suspect irregularities. “Given the above mentioned anomalies, we found it necessary to immediately conduct a targeted inspection on Nedbank to get better insight of the company’s profile,” stated Sithole. He went on to disclose that their investigations revealed that denominations of cash made were a combination of Rand notes and Emalangeni. Sithole alleged that this indicated a possibility that the funds might have been physically brought into the country as opposed to using formal banking system remittance.

“A cash withdrawal of E250 000  had been made which did not make sense since that  meant the funds left in the account were not sufficient to make the proposed transaction of USD 40 000 (Emalangeni equivalent E574 000) as at July 2016,” said the governor. He also disclosed that they also discovered a false declaration by the chief executive officer of Arinze’s company on a deposit slip misrepresenting himself as Tony, one of the company’s directors.

Post your comment

Your name:

Your e-mail address:

Add your comments:

Please enter the code you see in the image:

Image:

Code: