British prosecutors on Tuesday accused Diezani Alison-Madueke, the first woman president of OPEC, of enjoying a “life of luxury” from bribes taken when she was Nigeria’s oil minister.
The 65-year-old, who sat in the dock at London’s Southwark Crown Court on the first day of her trial, is accused of multiple counts of bribery between 2011 and 2015, when she was Nigeria’s minister for petroleum resources under then-president Goodluck Jonathan.
During that time, those who were interested in “lucrative oil and gas contracts” with Nigeria’s state-owned petroleum corporation provided “significant financial or other advantages” to Alison-Madueke, prosecutors told the court.
As a minister, “she should not have accepted benefits from those who were doing, no doubt extremely lucrative, business in oil and gas with government-owned entities,” the prosecution added. In Nigeria, several properties belonging to her and valued at several million dollars were seized by courts in 2017.
A spokesperson for Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC) confirmed that the agency had “some subsisting cases against her,” without giving additional details.
Alison-Madueke has been on bail since she was first arrested in London in October 2015. She has denied the charges against her. In 2023, she was formally charged with accepting bribes.
“We suspect Diezani Alison-Madueke abused her power in Nigeria and accepted financial rewards for awarding multi-million-pound contracts,” the UK National Crime Agency (NCA), which targets international and serious and organised crime, said at the time.