INVESTIGATION: Dasuki Money Trail: How ex-NSA approved suspicious billions for family friends

In June 2012, then-President Goodluck Jonathan appointed Sambo Dasuki, a retired army colonel, as his National Security Adviser (NSA). Mr Dasuki’s main charge was coordinating the government’s response to the terror group Boko Haram, which was emerging as a major national security challenge at the time.

Barely two months after his appointment, Mr Dasuki’s office approved the transfer of N270 million of public funds to his family friend Robert Oshodin, a Nigerian furniture manufacturer based in the United States, and his wife, Mimie. Over the three years of Mr Dasuki’s tenure, his office would make dozens of transfers of millions of dollars to the couple’s bank accounts.

Bank documents reviewed by PREMIUM TIMES indicate the payments were made for “consulting services” and “special ops,” among others. In mid-2014, documents also show the NSA’s office wired the couple $12 million in a single transfer for the “provision of counter-radicalisation campaign.”

Nigeria’s anti-graft agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), said the couple’s claim about the source of the fund was a lie.

The couple had only $50,000 as their account balance when they received the $12 million from Mr Dasuki’s office. Investigators alleged Mr Dasuki and the couple conspired to embezzle the equivalent of over N100 billion from government coffers during the period when Boko Haram was terrorising the population in a campaign of gruesome violence.

However, the EFCC’s case appears to have stalled in the courts. It is not clear whether any of the money has been recovered from the Oshodin couple.

PREMIUM TIMES, in collaboration with the Washington Post, retraced some of the key financial dealings between Mr Dasuki’s office and the Oshodins and, as the EFCC has alleged, their investment of public funds in mansions near Hollywood and the White House.

For this story, a Paris-based anti-corruption group, the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAAF), provided court documents, property records and analyses of them to PREMIUM TIMES and The Washington Post as part of a broader investigation into money laundering in real estate. PREMIUM TIMES verified the facts in partnership with The Post and obtained additional information independently.

Through its investigation, PREMIUM TIMES confirmed elements of the EFCC’s allegations against Mr Dasuki and the Oshodins. PREMIUM TIMES also pieced together a broader picture of Robert and Mimie Oshodin’s real estate investment activities that EFCC investigators appear unaware of.

Following in the EFCC’s footsteps

The EFCC indicted Mr and Mrs Oshodin on 25 counts of money laundering. Prosecutors say the Office of the NSA made two dozen transfers to the couple, totalling more than N100 billion, of which the couple wired $7.7 million to California in late June 2014. Mimie Oshodin pleaded not guilty and was granted bail in the sum of N250 million. The EFCC has said Robert Oshodin is “at large.”

For Mr Dasuki’s part, Nigeria’s State Security Service arrested him in late 2015, roughly six months after Mr Jonathan lost his reelection bid, for criminal breach of trust and for diverting as much as $2.1 billion from government coffers. He has denied the allegations, and the case remains in court.

Nigerian bank records and property deeds from California show that the $7.7 million wire transfer to the US outlined in the Oshodin indictment took place within days of the couple buying a $9.5 million historic mansion in Los Angeles, California, in cash.

The property bought by Oshodin couple in Los Angeles, shortly after receiving funds from Dasuki [PHOTO CREDIT:credit: Bob Riha, Jr]

Within four days of acquiring the property known as the Dorothy Chandler Estate, which features six bedrooms and eight bathrooms, the couple spent $6.5 million on an almost 2,000-square-metre home on the other side of the country, on the outskirts of the American capital. Again, they made the purchase in cash.

Excerpt from a property deed showing Oshodins company purchase the mansion in McLean, Virginia for $6.5 million

Nigerian government records and court filings show that the EFCC knew that in mid-2014, the Oshodins bought the Los Angeles estate and the palatial home near Washington, DC, through their California-registered investment firm, 1812 Corporation.

A filing for Robert and Mimie Oshodin’s California-registered investment firm, 1812 Corporation.

The same records show the EFCC tracked another purchase 1812 Corporation made about a year later of a $1.2 million property in the wealthy Washington, DC suburb of McLean, Virginia, not far from a mansion formerly owned by Queen Noor of Jordan and the current home of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The agency alleged that all three properties were purchased with payments from Mr Dasuki’s office.

But the agency’s efforts to seize the homes got tripped up in the courts and then stalled.

In 2019, the Federal High Court (FHC) in Abuja heard a suit in which Robert and Mimie Oshodin sought to block an EFCC effort to seize the mansion in Los Angeles and the two houses in McLean, Virginia.

Trial judge John Tsoho, now chief justice of the FHC, said the EFCC had “shown prima facie that the properties in the USA are proceeds of unlawful activity,” but he ruled in favour of the Oshodins, mainly because the properties were not within Nigerian jurisdiction.

Mr Tsoho further ruled that if the EFCC wished to cooperate with US authorities via a mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT), it would have to do so through then-Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami.

The judge also said the EFCC de facto violated the Oshodis’ rights and the court should not allow law enforcement bodies to “obtain orders that have the effect of depriving suspects who are presumed innocent, of their property permanently, without a hearing on their civil rights and obligations in respect of the property.”

US records raise new questions

Property records from the American states of California, Nevada, and Virginia raise fresh questions about how much Mr Dasuki’s office bankrolled Robert and Mimie Oshodin’s investments in the US. The records also suggest the couple’s investment activities changed after then-president Muhammadu Buhari’s government began  investigating and prosecuting Mr Dasuki and the couple.

While the EFCC appears to have focused its investigation on three of the Oshodins’ properties in the US, PREMIUM TIMES can confirm that during Mr Dasuki’s tenure as NSA, the couple bought 14 other properties in Los Angeles and McLean, Virginia, for almost $8 million, bringing their total real estate investments from 2012 to 2015 to nearly $24 million.

To this day, the couple owns properties in Los Angeles and McLean valued at $20 million, including the historic mansion near Hollywood that the EFCC tried to confiscate.

According to the US real estate website Zillow, the mansion is up for sale for $12.9 million as of the date of this publication.

America real estate website showing that the Oshodin couple’s Los Angeles estate is up for sale at a price of $12.9 million.

Mr and Mrs Oshodin bought two properties in a single week for $16 million in cash during Mr Dasuki’s tenure as NSA. However, their prior investment activities were more modest.

Between 2008 and 2012, when Mr Dasuki was appointed NSA, the couple spent a total of about $1.6 million on five properties in the western American states of California and Nevada. For their most expensive property in California, an $800,000 flat near Los Angeles, they obtained a 30-year bank loan covering half the purchase price. The couple also obtained a separate loan from an individual, though documents do not specify the terms.

Finally, their most expensive acquisition in Nevada was a Las Vegas home they bought in a 2010 auction after the prior owner failed to make timely payments on their mortgage.

During Mr Dasuki’s tenure as NSA, the Oshodin Couple bought 17 properties in Los Angeles and McLean, Virginia, for almost $24 million (₦4 billion).

In addition to these shifts in their real estate investment behaviour, the couple bought some properties shortly after they received bank transfers from the  office of the National Security Adviser in similar amounts.

As the EFCC has documented, in mid-2014, their investment firm, 1812 Corporation, purchased two mansions for $16 million in cash within days of Mr Dasuki’s office wiring them the equivalent of about $20 million. Some of the other property investments also appear to correlate with bank transfers.

In August 2012, Mr Dasuki’s office sent the equivalent of $1.7 million to the Oshodins in five tranches. Around this time, they sold their Los Angeles flat at a loss of $700,000. Then, the pair spent $2.4 million to buy two homes in Los Angeles, which matched the sum of the wire transfers and the proceeds from the sale.

In September 2014, they received about $306,000 from the NSA office and bought a Los Angeles home the next month for $330,000. On 24 April 2015, roughly a month before Mr Buhari’s inauguration, the NSA’s office wired almost $2 million to the couple. Again, within weeks, they bought three homes in Los Angeles for $2.4 million through a new – albeit similarly named – investment firm set up in California: 1812 Investments, LLC.

Just as the Oshodins’ investment activities spiked when Mr Dasuki took office, their approach changed again after he left office and faced legal scrutiny.

A week after Mr Buhari sacked Mr Dasuki, the 1812 Corporation transferred ownership of the “Dorothy Chandler Estate,” the couple’s most valuable home, into a legal mechanism called a living trust. Several weeks after Mr Dasuki was arraigned in Abuja, the Oshodins transferred ownership of two other high-value properties from 1812 Corporation into the same living trust.

In the year following Mr Dasuki’s arraignment, the pair’s property business became quite active. They sold nine properties, including five they had held for less than a year, for $5 million.

In late 2016, they even tried to sell their flagship estate in Los Angeles for $50 million, almost $40 million higher than its assessed value. Then, almost as soon as they sold the others, they purchased nine new properties, spending about $2 million.

Over the following years, Mr and Mrs Oshodin bought nine additional properties for $13 million, all but one of which they paid for through 1812 Investments, LLC.

Mimie Oshodin at a court appearance in Nigeria

They sold 18 properties during the same period, including a lot subdivided into four units, earning them at least $24 million. Of note, in early 2022, the Oshodin couple sold the two McLean, Virginia, properties targeted for seizure by the EFCC. Four days after selling the 2,000-square-metre estate for a loss of over a million dollars, they bought a $3 million mansion just down the road. They still own that

The EFCC, the Oshodins’ lawyer, Mr Dasuki’s lawyer and the US Department of Justice declined to comment when contacted. Mr Dasuki’s lawyer, Ahmed Raji, said he would not comment because “Dasuki’s matters are subjudice. Matters pending in court are not open to debate till the court has finished its job.” The Oshodin’s lawyer, Osahon Idemudia, also declined to comment when contacted by The Post. Mimie Oshodin did not also respond to an email sent to her. The US Justice Department simply said it “declines to comment” while EFCC spokesperson, Dele Oyewale, did not respond to calls and messages.

‘Thick as thieves’

US court filings, including hours of sworn depositions by Robert and Mimie Oshodin, paint a portrait of luxury and comfort enjoyed by the couple and the degree of personal and financial entanglement between the Oshodin and Dasuki families.

The records reviewed by PREMIUM TIMES underscore the Nigerian government’s allegations about the Oshodins and raise broader questions about the source of their wealth. Furthermore, the case suggests that monies Mr Dasuki’s agency paid Robert and Mimie for purportedly official reasons, in some measure, benefited his own family.

In 2015, the Oshodins filed a suit in a California superior court against a major American insurance company for breach of contract. The couple said the company failed to compensate them adequately after gunmen allegedly stormed their estate in Los Angeles and stole safes the couple claims held tens of millions of dollars in jewellery and other valuables.

The insurance company ultimately succeeded in its defence, which was upheld on appeal. The judge ordered the Oshodin couple to pay almost $500,000 to cover the defendant’s legal expenses.

Sworn depositions and other filings to the superior court and a California court of appeals painstakingly detail the couple’s considerable wealth and their lifestyle. PREMIUM TIMES calculated that between their American property holdings and valuables identified in the court filings, the couple’s wealth exceeded $40 million at the end of Mr Dasuki’s tenure.

An excerpt from a document filed in a California court showing items of jewelry the Oshodin couple alleges was stolen from their Los Angeles estate.

Before the alleged burglary, PREMIUM TIMES calculated that the Oshodin couple owned properties they bought for $23 million. In the case against the insurance company, the Oshodins provided a jewellery expert with photographs of their collection, which included 27 luxury wristwatches and men’s diamond rings worth $3.2 million, to estimate the replacement costs for what they claimed were stolen.

According to the couple’s jeweller, the gunmen made off with items worth $15.4 million, although the defence disputed this figure. A separate court filing on the burglary notes that in their Los Angeles estate, the Oshodins had thousands of bottles of wine, “$1.1 million draperies,” 30 crystal chandeliers, a $45,000 gold-encrusted mobile telephone, and a “very beautiful door…from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.”

An excerpt from a document filed in a California court showing items of jewelry the Oshodin couple alleges was stolen from their Los Angeles estate.

Notably, apart from funds sent by ONSA, Nigerian law enforcement and court records reviewed by PREMIUM TIMES do not give insight into the other sources of the Oshodins’ wealth and income, such as revenue figures for their furniture business in Benin City.

However, a suit Mr Oshodin filed against telecom operator MTN Nigeria for breach of contract in 2009 indicates their income before Mr Dasuki’s tenure. In that Edo State case, which was ruled in Mr Oshodin’s favour in late 2014, the plaintiff claimed the firm shut off one of his furniture company’s main phone lines without notice, resulting in “colossal business losses,” as well as “emotional, physical and psychological trauma.”

Mr Oshodin told the court that MTN Nigeria cost him a furniture contract worth about N394 million ($2.4 million at that time). He said he likely would have made a profit margin of 35 per cent of the total contract, which yields roughly N138 million ($856,944).

While plaintiffs may exaggerate their claims when seeking damages in court, this “colossal” loss would constitute a small fraction of what the Oshodin couple spent in a week on US real estate five years later.

Records from Nigeria and the US also detail the relationship between the Dasuki and Oshodin families and the degree to which their interests are entangled.

In their sworn depositions in the California insurance case, the Oshodins said they had been family friends of the Dasukis for decades and even served as legal guardians for Mr Dasuki’s twin children since 2000.

The same depositions suggest that one of the twins was in the couple’s Los Angeles estate when it was invaded by gunmen. Mr Oshodin told lawyers he was travelling at the time of the burglary when Mr Dasuki’s son called Mrs Oshodin to inform her of the situation.

Another chapter in the EFCC case shows the close relationship between the two families. According to a US court filing that summarises elements of the EFCC’s investigation and which PREMIUM TIMES separately confirmed with materials from the agency, a few weeks after the ONSA transferred funds to the Oshodins in December 2013, they wired a portion of the funds to a construction company.

According to the US court document summarising the EFCC’s findings, the construction company used those funds to build a house for Mr Dasuki in Kaduna State.

There are other signs of the close ties between the two families. In early 2015, bank records identified an individual with almost the exact same name as Mr Dasuki’s eldest child as having transferred about $850,000 to Mr Oshodin’s business bank account.

Several months earlier, that same Dasuki family member appears to have purchased a $2 million home about a 10-minute drive from the Oshodins’ palatial mansion near the American capital.

How the US enables corruption

According to an annual study conducted by global anti-corruption group Transparency International, Nigeria is among the most corrupt countries in the world, ranked 145th among 180 countries.

But, as former leading FBI international corruption investigator Debra LaPrevotte told PREMIUM TIMES, “[w]hen people are stealing money, the first thing they want to do is get it out of their country.” So, why does a country like the US, which Transparency International rates among the world’s least corrupt countries, seemingly welcome these funds, including at the doorstep of the White House?

Gary Kalman, the executive director of Transparency International’s US chapter, has an answer. In December 2023, Mr Kalman and his team published a report entitled A Welcome Mat for Corruption. They found that the US framework for protecting the real estate sector from illicit financial flows lags behind those of 21 peer countries. The report labels the US a “singular outlier.”

And the sector is an attractive target for corrupt officials and criminals for reasons beyond its deficient anti-money laundering protections. Mr Kalman told PREMIUM TIMES that the US real estate market is also an attractive destination for dirty money because the country generally enjoys political and economic stability, there is a lot of opacity, and the residential real estate sector is large, to the tune of about $35 trillion.

“If [the sector] were its own country, it would be the largest economy in the world,” Mr Kalman noted.

Furthermore, he said that some of the most critical agencies tracking potentially illicit financial flows that touch the US financial system, notably the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), are chronically underfunded and shorthanded.

According to Mr Kalman, even using an investment firm to buy properties where the owners’ names are identified in publicly available official databases, as was the case with the Oshodins, might be enough to evade the minimal levels of scrutiny applied to some real estate transactions.

“The details of this case serve as a textbook example of where there are loopholes and gaps in our laws, starting with the real estate sector,” Mr Kalman said. He also found it noteworthy that when the Oshodin couple moved the funds to the US to buy their two most expensive properties in mid-2014, they sent the money to an escrow company in California and an attorney in Virginia.

“While banks have responsibilities to ask questions—and a few other types of enterprises or sectors that were deemed to be financial institutions—escrow agents, lawyers, and title agents were not. And there is a bill in the United States Congress called the ENABLERS Act that is trying to bring anti-money laundering responsibilities to corporate service providers more broadly.”

For her part, retired FBI special agent Ms LaPrevotte said the facts of the case suggested that the Oshodins may face serious legal risk for possible money laundering and even tax law violations if they didn’t declare the transfers from the office of the Nigerian National Security Adviser as income.

She noted that the Nigerian government should be “asking for the US government to interview [the Oshodins] and, if appropriate, charge them with money laundering.” And, she mused, “If the Nigerian government has not already asked for the assistance of their foreign partners—US, UK, Canada, and so on—why haven’t they?”

It is unclear if the EFCC requested such assistance, but US court filings give us insights. Before Nigerian law enforcement suffered setback in the courts, the California attorneys for the insurance company the Oshodins sued got wind of their connection to a possible corruption case in Nigeria.

The attorneys spoke with EFCC agents and then introduced much of the evidence related to the EFCC’s investigation into the record in California. Not long after that contact, an EFCC agent sent a message to the US Department of Justice about the Oshodin case. After providing a summary of the facts, the agent ended with a plea: “It is our humble request you trace the money with a view to blocking it pls (sic).”

However, this may not have been enough, according to Ms LaPrevotte, who, during her career chasing dirty money, led investigations into a $4.5 billion allegedly embezzled by Sani Abacha and former petroleum minister Diezani Alison-Madueke. “The first thing you assume is that nothing happens off of an email,” she told PREMIUM TIMES.

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Ms LaPrevotte added that little would happen in the US without a formal request for help. “We have to get cooperation from the host government because that’s where the crime was committed, and that’s where the evidence exists,” she added.

Only then, she said, would the authorities be able to thoroughly trace the funds on American soil.

Ms LaPrevotte noted that there isn’t much to infer about what American authorities may or may not have done in light of the EFCC’s brief missive and from the fact that the properties weren’t seized in the end. “That email could have stimulated further investigation. They may have gone back and said ‘this is great, send us an MLAT,’ and maybe nobody ever did.”

She said the US authorities might have been sitting by the proverbial phone, waiting for a call from Abuja. According to Ms LaPrevotte, US authorities would have little reason to prosecute the Oshodins separately if the Nigerian government was already prosecuting them.

In Ms LaPrevotte’s telling, almost everything in these cases hinges on the political will to pursue them. She said that in her experience, political will is a critical precondition for the successful investigation and prosecution of international corruption cases. “Without it, the barriers for action seem to be high—even if not insurmountable—but with the US serving as a magnet for so much dirty money, competing priorities and resource limitations may mean certain funds never make it home.”