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Vero Record

Reporting and documentary investigation from Nigeria. What the paper says, and what it does not.

The Dossiers  /  File 03

Cross-border · 2000 to 2010 · In preparation

Atiku

Opened on . No findings have been published, and this page contains none. What follows is the scope, the two public documents the file will rest on, and the limits that were fixed before any searching began.

Status: scope fixed  ·  findings published: none  ·  no charge was ever brought, and nothing here suggests otherwise

The two documents

In February 2010 the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the United States Senate published a report on foreign corruption and the American financial system, built around four case histories. One of those case histories concerned Atiku Abubakar, then a former Vice President of Nigeria, and his wife, a United States citizen. It described transfers into American accounts and the role of offshore corporations in moving them.

Separately, in a civil complaint filed in 2008 in connection with a large foreign bribery case, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission made an allegation involving payments to the same individual. The complaint is a public court filing.

Both documents were denied by those they concerned. Neither produced a criminal charge in the United States against either of them, and none has been brought since.

What the file exists to test

Not whether the allegations are true. A Senate subcommittee report is a congressional document, not a verdict, and a civil complaint is a pleading, which is a party's assertion rather than a court's finding. Neither of them decides anything, and a file that treated them as decisions would be doing precisely what File 01 was built to stop.

What the file tests is narrower and answerable: what the underlying exhibits show, whether they are locatable in a public docket, what the responses on the record actually said, and what has happened in the sixteen years since, including any proceeding that did reach a determination anywhere.

Fixed before searching

Four propositions were written down at the moment the file was opened, before any record was pulled, so that the file cannot quietly become an argument for a conclusion chosen in advance.

  1. If no charge was ever brought, the file says so at the top and repeats it wherever the reader might forget it.
  2. If the exhibits behind the case history are not in any public docket, the file records their absence and does not paraphrase the summary as though it were the evidence.
  3. If a denial is on the record, it is quoted at the length it was given, not summarised into a sentence that reads like a concession.
  4. If the strongest available material turns out to be a congressional summary and a pleading, the file publishes that finding, which is a modest one, rather than dressing it up.

What this file will not do

  1. It will not assert criminality. No court has found any, in the United States or in Nigeria.
  2. It will not treat a subcommittee's account of a transaction as a proven transaction.
  3. It will not use a civil complaint's allegations as findings, which is the single most common error made with documents of this kind.
  4. It will not import material from the political season it sits in. A claim first made in a campaign is not evidence, whoever made it.

When it publishes

When the exhibits are located in a public docket, or when their absence from every public docket is itself documented to the standard the other files use. Whichever of those happens first is the version that runs.

There is a third possibility, and it is stated here so it cannot later look like a retreat: the file may establish very little. If that is the outcome, it will be published as a short file saying so, because a public record that will not carry a claim is a fact about the record, and readers are entitled to it.