Prodeco International Limited, a company in which former Nigeria’s vice president, Atiku Abubakar, has an interest, was flagged for suspicious transactions totalling $2.3 million in 2011, suspicious activities report filed with the United States’ Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), have shown.
FinCEN files, a new investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, BuzzFeed and 108 media partners across the world, are a large volume of leaked confidential financial reports relating to the transaction activities of world leaders, terrorists, drug dealers and money launderers.
Premium Times reports that the files include a large number of suspicious activity reports (SARs), filed by banks and other financial institutions to the US Government as required by the Bank Secrecy Act., with the total amount in suspicious transactions reported being $2 trillion ($2,099584,477,415.49).
Prodeco reportedly made a total of five wire-transfer transactions, totalling $2,317,793.68 between November 26, 2010, and January 18, 2011. Atiku had in September 2017 disclosed his ownership of Prodeco.
The company, affiliated with Intels Nigeria Limited, Nigeria’s largest logistics company co-founded by Atiku and Italian Gabrielle Volpi, operates within the oil and gas industry and is headquartered in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital.
The flagged funds were wired by Prodeco from an account at Standard Chartered Bank, United Kingdom. They were flagged by the Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas (DBTCA) based in New York, United States.
The beneficiary banks involved in the transactions were a Lagos branch of Bank PHB Plc, now known as Keystone Bank Limited; Deutsche bank AG, a German multinational investment bank; Ecobank Nigeria Plc; and Skye Bank Plc, now known as Polaris Bank.
The recipients of the funds were identified as Coltyn Enterprises Nigeria Ltd, Drake and Sean Limited, Mbonny Technical Services Limited, Melchers Trading Gmbh, and Unicorn Integrated Marine.
Further analysis of the activities identified an unusual variation in transaction amounts ranging from $11,345.51 to $1,300,000, the filing said.
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