Tinubu
What was investigated, what was settled without admission, and what was never decided by any court. Four hundred and eighty-seven pages and six hundred numbered findings, built entirely from records a stranger can retrieve without asking us for anything.
What the file is
It is an evidentiary file rather than an argument. Every proposition in it carries a grade: a primary record we retrieved, a statement by someone identifiable, or an inference of our own. The grade is printed next to the claim, not buried in an endnote, so a reader can see at a glance which sentences would survive a hostile reading and which are ours.
The file was built from six bodies of record: United States federal court files, Nigerian corporate and electoral registers, United Kingdom company filings, Nigerian federal audit reports, published diplomatic cables that have been in the public domain for years, and the successive archived versions of an official biography.
The distinction the file turns on
A civil forfeiture proceeding is not a criminal charge. A settlement is not a finding. A case that ends without any admission of wrongdoing has decided nothing about whether wrongdoing occurred, and a document proving that an allegation was made proves only that it was made.
Almost every disputed sentence written about this subject over thirty years collapses that distinction in one direction or the other. The file separates it out and holds the line in both directions: it records what the documents say, and it records with equal prominence what no court has ever determined.
What the file does not claim
- It does not assert that any criminal offence was committed. No court has found one, and the file says so wherever the question arises.
- It does not treat a settlement, a forfeiture, or a returned sum as an admission by anybody.
- It does not present an untested allegation as established merely because the document containing it is authentic.
- It does not claim that an absent record proves a record never existed. Where a register returns nothing, the file says the record is not readable today, and stops there.
- It draws no conclusion about intent. Intent is not in any of these documents.
Corrections
Four errors have been found in this file since it was assembled. Each is recorded on the page where the original claim stood, at the same length, under the same heading, with the date it was found. None has been deleted, and the earlier wording remains visible above the correction.
That is the entire corrections policy, and it applies to the reporting on this site as well. A correction that holds up is published. A correction that does not hold up is published too, with the reason it did not.
How to check it
The whole file can be read in the page, with its own contents list beside it, and every docket number, register query and audit reference is printed inside it. Nothing needs to be requested from us and nothing is behind a login. The queries were written so that a reader running them in a different country, on a different day, reaches the same page we did or finds that it has moved, which is itself worth knowing.
Where a document would have settled a question and we did not obtain it, the file names the document, names its custodian, prints its price, and leaves the question open with the inference stated plainly as an inference. We pull no extracts ourselves. A single copy in one interested pair of hands is weaker evidence than many copies obtained independently by people who owe this work nothing.