BAYO OJO, SAN WAS PAID $10M OUT OF $50M FOR MALABU OIL DEAL ‘SERVICES’

Nigeria’s former minister of justice, Bayo Ojo, SAn admitted to an Italian court on Thursday, 08 fEBRUARY, 2019, in Milan that he had an agreement with former petroleum minister and proprietor of Malabu Oil, Dan Etete, to be paid the sum of $50 million for legal support services including the sourcing of buyers for the oil well, OPL 245. Mr Ojo, however, claimed that he only received $10 million between 2009 and 2011.

Mr Ojo made the revelation during his cross-examination at the ongoing trial of former officials of Royal Dutch Shell and Italian Agip-Eni for the payment of $1.1 billion made to Mr Etete, a convicted felon for the lucrative but controversial oil block. The ex-minister told the court that he was still hoping to collect the balance of the what was left of the agreed $50 million, he was not going to sue to be paid the balance.

Mr Ojo, was paid the sum even though he admitted he could not find buyers for the oil block at the time, even as he knew that Shell and Eni could be potential buyers. When pressed to disclose to the court the specific job he did that warranted payment of $10 million, which was paid in two tranches of $5 million each– one to an account of his law firm and the other to his personal account – Mr Ojo declined, citing professional secrecy. He told the Court he was only aware of the involvement of the two oil giants after reading content of the agreement transferring the oil asset to Mr Etete’s company.

However, even his claim of not being aware of the content of the agreement until when he was hired by Mr Etete to find buyers of oil well seems at odds with the fact that Mr Ojo and Edmund Daukoru, a minister of state for petroleum and Ojo’s cabinet colleague during ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration, were both named by immediate past minister of justice, Mohammed Adoke, as stewarding the development of the agreement that led to the transfer of the oil asset to Mr Etete. “I believe it is your responsibility to explain to the public who are being sold a fiction that the transaction started from President Olusegun Obasanjo, GCFR under whose administration the Terms of Settlement were brokered with Chief Bayo Ojo, SAN, as the then Attorney General who executed the Terms of Settlement before the tenure of President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, GCFR who approved the final implementation of the Terms of Settlement and my humble self who executed the resolution agreements,” Mr Adoke had said in a petition dated March 6 2018 which he authored in a bid to exonerate himself from blame in the controversial oil deal.

Mr Ojo, who admitted to knowing of Mr Etete’s interest in the Malabu, maintained that he does not see any conflict of interests in an oil minister assigning an oil asset to his company. He also asserted that the OPL245 was reallocated to Malabu (it was originally revoked by the Obasanjo administration) because the government was more interested in the $200 million signature bonus that it was poised to collect on the deal. [Malabu did not eventually pay that signature bonus.]