A British woman was found guilty in Britain Thursday of helping fugitive Nigerian governor Joshua Dariye to launder millions of pounds meant for the poor in the west African country.
Joyce Oyebango, 41, was convicted by a jury in London of one count of conspiring with Dariye to launder the funds by opening bank accounts in Britain to allow him to gain access to the money.
Oyebango, who was born in the eastern Scottish region of Fife and has one child, insisted she had been duped into laundering the funds but the five-man, five-woman jury at London’s Southwark Crown Court decided she was lying.
The conviction centres on her actions between January 1, 2000 and July 27, 2004.
Dariye, the governor of Nigeria’s northern Plateau State, was indicted in Britain on money laundering charges but jumped bail and returned in November 2004 to his home state where he enjoyed constitutional immunity against prosecution.
The court heard he used to spend tens of thousands of pounds of state funds on private school fees, paid air ambulance bills for his friends, and pocketed about 200,000 pounds (298,000 euros, 391,000 dollars) of “cleaned-up cash” during one of his several holidays to London.
Peter Clarke, who now heads London’s Metropolitan Police anti-terrorism unit, told an investigating panel in Plateau State in November last year that the case against the governor was seen in the British capital as a big issue.
He also said that London police had almost completed the process of repatriating all the accounts under investigation to Nigeria, according to the official News Agency of Nigeria.
Clarke, who had arrested and interrogated Dariye in London, told the panel that all the 13 offshore London accounts and a mansion owned by Dariye had already been forfeited, according to NAN.
Days after Clarke addressed the panel, Dariye was impeached by state legislators on accusations of corruption and money laundering.