 And welcome once again to the Breakfast on Plus TV Africa. Our first major conversation for today is going to be discussing the Pandora papers. This broke a couple of days ago and of course has made headlines across the world. If you listen to news media organizations from, you know, the Washington Post, the Daily to the New York Times, it's one of the biggest conversations across the world because of how interesting the details are with Pandora papers. And of course, like I mentioned earlier, it covers, you know, it's, you know, exposes or touches rather on persons of interest from presidents to kings, political leaders, businessmen from across the world. Nigeria in particular has 10 persons of interest and just a few names have been put out so far in the last couple of days. We're speaking this morning with a journalist from the premium Times, Nicolas Ibeque. Good morning. Thanks for joining us, Mr. Ibeque. Good morning for having me. All right, let's start with, you know, you telling us, you know, what exactly Pandora papers is all about. What's the general idea behind it? Well, the idea behind it is first trying to broaden transparency, really. A lot of the world was powerful people and some of the world where there's people, you know, for instance, don't pay their fair share in taxes. They have also amassed so much wealth and they are hiding them in all of this jurisdiction, this secret jurisdiction where they are beyond the reach of the authorities of the government or beyond the tax authority or the law enforcement authorities. Criminals who have perhaps made money from the sales of illicit drugs or kidnapping or from the mob are also hiding their money, I mean, their resources in places like that away from people. So the first thing is they're trying to broaden transparency and say, this is what is it. These people are keeping these assets in all of these places. It's also what is also, it also does. It's also helped to show the level of inequality in the world generally. Why some people are amassing wealth somewhere and the amount of the poor people in the world is just getting, they are afraid of the poor because it's just getting worse. So it's to show that there is money somewhere being kept. People have moved money and all of that. It's also helped to show corruption. Our first story, basically, was on the former governor of Peter O'Bee and how he flouted the laws of the country. So several times the Guardian has done a story about how the lawyer of the queen of the royal family of the UK physically helped Governor Bagudu of KB State to move his money to Singapore and stuff like that. So this is the idea behind it. This is the third itinerary of the leaks we've had. And interestingly, they all started letter P. We had the Panama Papers, then we had the Paradise Papers which is the least known of all the papers because the document, the data we got was not so big. Now we have the Pandora Papers. So yeah. How much time did it take for these, I've read it, it says 11 million plus documents that were released or put together. How long did it take to gather all this information? And are some of these things public knowledge that a lot of people just haven't looked into? Well, first and foremost, I don't know how much it took the sources to gather them. We got them from 14 offshore providers. It's a company that helped you to set up companies in Bahamas, in PVI. There's the British, Virgin Islands, Singapore and all of that. So it got from 14 of them and it was given to the ICIG, the ICIG International Consortium for Investigative Journalists. So that's what we have. So yeah, it's 11.9 million files. So don't see a file as one page. Sometimes I remember looking at a file that is up to over 300 pages. So that's one page. So don't think it is just, because it is seen as five because it's one, at least with one thing. Some files are 65 pages long, 100 pages long. Some files are just one page. So that tells you how huge it was. It took 600 journalists two years to actually dig into it. It's like looking for a pin in a haystack where you have to dig into them, you get the document out, you have to read the document, you have to compare the document with public available information like court cases. The one we did today, we had to do some comparison with court cases in Nigeria. Comparison with an advert, the property advert in the UK. And we have to match all of these things up and all of that. So it takes a lot of work. A lot of several meetings, all the meetings were going to kill me. But yeah, I'm someone who would like to see the admittance. So it is what it is. I think the end justifies the mainstream. Yeah, I know that there are mostly online meetings. I listened to a podcast on the Washington Post, I believe, that played some of the clips from the meetings. Pretty interesting discussions also. But before the coronavirus went ballistic, we had fiscal meetings, which were to be in the Republic. The African journalists were going to the Republic to discuss this as well. Okay, now I want to also ask about, before we go into the details here and there of what has been leaked for Nigeria, I want to ask, are these necessarily crimes or they're just, you know, information that has been exposed here and there? Would you call them criminal activity outrightly? Okay, let me make something clear. First of all, open an offshore account. Open an offshore company is not criminal in most cases. In most countries, that's not criminal. To have an offshore, I mean, some of the biggest corporations in the world, they use it to, they call it tax management to manage their tax so that they didn't get to pay as much tax as, it is not fair. It is not fair. It may not be morally okay, but it is not illegal. So there's a difference between that. So tax avoidance and tax evasion. You know, I mean, there's a difference between the two. One is legal, one is not illegal. You know, so I mean, and all of that. So people use it to manage their taxes, their payment of taxes. But what we have done, some of the stories we have done, is that we have shown that why this may not be an illegal activity. Some people have, in their course of opening this offshore company, they've broken the public service. Take the case of OB for instance. The law of the country says you must declare your assets when you're a public officer. OB did not do that. OB did not do that. He had his assets there. The law of the country says you must not operate a falling back account. OB has a falling back account. And he did not close the account while he was a governor. So this is him breaking those laws. We didn't say OB stole money because a lot of people are conflicting this and say no, it's money laundering. No, in the case of OB, it wasn't money laundering. It's not that he broke some specific laws of the country and by opening up those accounts and not revealing them to the Nigerian authorities. That is one thing. He also went as far as admitting that he didn't, I mean, he said he did not know that he had to declare those assets. So that is that about that. Now, in the case of Bagudu, the governor of Kirby State, he is a known aperture money launderer. He has been laundering money for the aperture, for the Sonya aperture dictator, Sonya aperture, since the, I mean, early 90s, he's been laundering money. Our aperture there in 1998. So he has been moving that money from one jurisdiction to the other. So what he did now, but last year, the U.S. government got interested in those money that he has kept in some offshore places. So for him, he was trying to move the money from the original offshore jurisdiction to somewhere he thinks that the U.S. does not have powers to seize the money. So the money was, some of the money were imbibed by somewhere in Jersey, the island of Jersey. The island of Jersey is just a tiny piece of land. It's a sovereign country, but the U.S. have so much authority and so much influence over them that if the U.S. say, hey, release this money, they will have a trust, they will have a choice to give it to the U.S. So he moved the money to Singapore, where he thinks that the U.S. does not have that kind of power or something to grab hold of the money. So these are some of the things that we are looking at. I mean, the one we published today is about the governor for sure who also broke the law by opening up these companies and not declining them, but not only that. He used the company that he owned, that he opened offshore to buy a property that the Nigerian government has secured and fees all that on already. A property that he secured and fees all that on from Kola Aluku. Kola Aluku was accused, one of the people who were Kola Aluku and GD of Mokori, but one of those who were accused of keeping design or administer to launder money stolen from the NNPC and from the Nigerian government. So why the Nigerian government has secured fees all that on that property? They were able to sell that property for cheap and he bought it. And Tinobu, who we know, I mean, we know that Oye Tola is a relative of Tinobu who is his cousin, apart from that, Oye Tola is also a well-known surrogate of Tinobu. So Tinobu is staying in the property. I mean, from all internet purposes, we don't have proof for that, but you can argue that perhaps the property is owned by Tinobu. We did not say that, but because Oye Tola is Tinobu's relative. So this is how he can become illegal. So the fact of opening that company in itself is not illegal, but because of the secrecy that provides, you can use that company to indulge in some illegal activities. That is why it is very, very, very important that these things are exposed. All right. Now, let's go in detail about some of these cases. Now, is there a possibility that the... Because I read through this morning, so not entirely, but it says also that President Mahmoud Bwari had met with Bola and Tinobu in that same building, that same house. So is there a possibility that these persons are not aware of where the house came from or how that house came into existence? And does this also mean or expose somehow, some way that some of the property that the current government in Nigeria is seizing and of course the courts are asking to be forfeited to the government, are somehow, some way sold back to government cronies and government friends of the government? Well, first and foremost, I don't work for the government. I don't know if they are aware, but it was in government. It was the federal government. Look at the court case that secured the fees order. It was the federal government of Nigeria that actually applied and identified that property. They identified the property and applied that they wanted to seize it. They must have done some homework before they got that property and they had the address of that property and they said they were going to seize it. It was not me. So Bwari at the head of the government should know. If he doesn't know, his attorney general or people around him should have briefed him. So he had no business going there. So that is not an excuse that I am not aware. How are you not aware of the property your government had secured the fees order on? I'm sorry. That's cool. So that is not our own problem. So we have to assume that they are aware of the property. Now to the second part of your question. For instance, look at this property in question. The government has secured the fees order on the property. So the government should take possession of the property. And today but somebody else is buying it. The top politician is living in it. So he chose you the whole, like we say, any howness of the way government runs is unfair. And they are not able to keep track of some of these things. It's a shame. It's really a shame that money that we're stolen from the public treasury physically and seized have been in a rather bad way taken over by some other politicians again because that is what it is really. Is this also shedding more light on, now that you've mentioned Desiani Maduike, I remember that the EFCC chairman had mentioned that there was jury, what millions of dollars that was also seized by the government. Should this also then raise red flags as to whether those things are still in government possession or maybe have been sold to interesting persons? Well, if the government secure a complete freeze order on such properties, jewellery and what have you, the government will sell them. That is the right thing to do. You don't keep them in a museum. You want the money. You want to convert them into money because the person who bought those things really stole money to buy them. So the problem here is that the selling of those things are not transparent. We don't know when the government sees this house in Abuja, see the house in Lagos, in Potakot. That's all we hear in the news. And after that, we never knew who bought those properties. It's not transparent. So people somewhere who are close to the EFCC or close to the government go by. Ideally, it should be made an auction. People should bid for such property and buy them over. It should be publicly done. But we don't see that being done. And because of the secrecy around it, it creates room for manipulation and appeals of those processes. This is a classic example of what would go wrong when government are not open with these things. Apologies for saying too long on this particular one. I'm still going to read through it. But is it also possible that the Pandora papers would go further and know where the source of the money that was used to purchase this property in particular, what the source of that money is, basically? Well, the Pandora paper, we are not magicians. We really have records of you set up a company, and all of that. Most of those companies, they don't tell the people who set up the company for how they got the money. Sometimes they don't actually say, oh, we got it from business. And that is enough for the people set up the company. We didn't have access to their accounts details. We only have the documents from the company registrar. Like I'm going to the CAC to get your company details. The CAC does not keep record of your accounts. That is with your bank. So this document leak was gotten from the company registrar, not from the assets managers or the financial managers of this company. So we don't have that. Until when we are able to get their bank record, we can say, oh, this money came from there. Until then, we can only do what we can do, what we have at our disposal. All right. Great. Now, let's move away from Goigai Itola and, of course, the current president, Mohammad Bahraini and Desyani. Let's move to Peter Obey now. We're going to go to Bagudu, finally, I guess. But let's go to the Peter Obey story and talk a little bit about it. I've seen other people who put out their own statements and their own analysis of the premium times expose. And try to analyze it better and say that he hasn't necessarily broken any laws with regards declaring bank accounts in other countries and declaring to the Code of Conduct Bureau. Have you also read some of all those tweets and statements? Yeah, I've seen a couple of them. And what I say is very simple. The first thing first is the laws were clear. We pointed out the laws that he probably had broken. So that is a legal argument. I mean, you have also seen people who are arguing for what we did and people who are arguing against it. If you have a responsive government, you should go in and charge him and let them go and make the argument in court. And if Peter Obey thinks that we have represented him wrongly, he should publish a reporter, then we will respond to him or he should charge us to court. Then we will go there and defend ourselves. But again, the thing again here is that Peter Obey himself claimed ignorance. Nobody is talking about all those analyses and all what I view. I'm not talking about the fact that Peter Obey told premium times that he was not aware that he had to declare those properties. He told us that. What was the reason he didn't think he needed to declare? Well, he said that because his wife and children are part owners of the company and he doesn't think that he should declare any jointly owned assets. But that is false. Because the Nigerian law says that you're not only declaring your assets, it's claiming your assets of your adult's children and your spouse. It's not because of your assets. It's not because of your own personal assets. It's not because of your adult children. Your children are from 18 and above. But the property they own must be declared as well. The reason for all of this is to prevent corruption, prevent fraud, to aid transparency and all of that. And people are going to the back door and even the case of owning a foreign bank account, that is very, very clear. There is no ambiguity in that. Most people who are saying these things are Peter Obey supporters and all of that. But yeah, but it's fine. People can say what they want to say. But what I told them and told some of them is we will not respond until we hear from Peter Obey. And if Peter Obey does not respond to what he wants to go to court, fine, let him go to court. Then if the government thinks that they want to charge him to court from what we have done, then let him go and defend himself at the CCB. That's not our, that has the code of conduct rule. That's not our code of conduct tribunal. It's a city. So that is not our own business. We have done our own work as donaldies. We put out the information we have out there and it's also good for engagement. It's good for discussion. It's also help to strengthen our democracy. Which, if you ask me, is one of the primary function of investigative journalism. So that's fine. Yeah. I'm sure that there's also going to be political angles to some of all of this. Because I saw in the papers yesterday, I think it was a daily trust, there were certain people that were asking that the government goes ahead to investigate Bagudu and Peter Obey. And investigate every Pandora League, basically. But what are your thoughts on the political angles to this? And those who might try to draw political, you know, or colorations, basically, to some of these discussions. And of course, if the government decides to go ahead and make these moves. Well, I'm a journalist. I'm not a politician. I have nothing to say about that. Let politicians deal with their own problem. That's me. I've done my work and it ends there. So I have absolutely nothing to say about that. I don't have any political affiliation. I'm not doing my story because I support one party or the other or something. I do my story as an impartial journalist who is putting out the information that he has gotten out there. And so be it. I don't know about government. Let them handle their own problem. I will handle mine. Yeah. And bring that up because I saw a lot of the responses to your own tweets. Some of the statements that you made and those who said that you dropped the ball with, you know, the way that it was released. So can you quickly also respond to that? Well, I, again, I said this. I don't know what they want me to do. I don't know what they want. What do you mean by drop the ball? I did my research. I put my information out there. They are writing. They are writing. We joined us and out. It's democracy. It's good. Let them, let's the discussion continue. You know, someone said, oh, the way you said it with clay. What do you mean with clay? I mean, these are politicians. I don't owe any politician any sober attitude before I put up my story. I don't owe anybody any question. I'm not a political man. I'm not a politician. I'm not a member of government aid or somewhat political appointee. I shouldn't be sober when I, I've done a job for two years. Serious work there, night working. And don't expect me to be, to put out some tone of congratulated, self-congratulated tone for seeing my work come out there. Hell no. I mean, I just put it there. If anybody's not happy about it, then they can decide to go in their house and become sober and wear sad clothes and mourn. But I'm not going to mourn for writing this story. I'm not going to mourn for writing this story. That's really... Okay. Now let's talk the KGB State Governor of Bagudu and the different angles concerning, you know, that release also. Of course, you know, like you mentioned, you know, he, you know, allegedly is known to be one of the persons who assisted the Sanabacha government to launder money. Do you expect that this should be damaging for a person who holds such a position today in government? And seen also... Well, ordinarily it should. You know, ordinarily it should. This is a serial money laundromat. He and his brother Ibrahim. They are serial money laundromats. In fact, the grand government was going to give them $10 million sometime ago. I did that story for some crazy agreement that he signed and something else. I think it was a repatriation of funds back then. Yeah. It was quite weird. I mean, it's quite insane what they were going to do. Anyway, yeah. In any country, Mahgudi should have resigned a long time ago. He shouldn't be governor at all. He shouldn't be able to contest. He was in prison for six months in the U.S. You know, when he was arrested and in which he did and paid a huge amount of money before he was released, you know. So he shouldn't be governor at all. He's governor... I mean, his house of assembly should be impeaching him now. But that wouldn't happen. The government, the attorney general, should be piling up a case against him. But the attorney general is from the U.S. and we have learned that he is working towards maybe perhaps trying to succeed the governor himself. So I'm not hopeful that anything will be done. It's sad. It's disheartening. It's like a wet blanket on all we have done. But it is what it is when you have a government who cannot separate itself from its political affiliation and all of that and deal with criminal issues as criminal issues and not as political issues. Here today. You made mention earlier about the U.K. government assisting a particular person with, you know, they all move to London money or to transfer their money to Singapore. Am I correct? No, I didn't say the U.K. government. No, I didn't say that. I said a lawyer... Okay, a lawyer, okay. ...for the Uyaw family. Okay. A lawyer. So a lawyer can work for several people. So that has nothing to do with the U.K. government now. Okay. It was the lawyer who moved to Maui to help Bagudu to set up another offshore company in Singapore and he was moving the money from the other jurisdiction to the Singaporean company. How much money are we talking about here with regard to Bagudu? Bagudu is huge. It's insane. I can't give you the scientific about the amount that Bagudu has stolen from Abacha. Don't think about the amount that Bagudu has stolen. I mean, Abacha is a gift that keeps giving. We have gotten some of this money elsewhere. Because Bagudu was a frontline money laundromat. Because at the time, Abacha had a bad international rep. He was a dictator. He was brutal. So he couldn't go anywhere and set up a company himself. So he tried to pick somebody who was relatively unknown at the time to help him set up this company and was moving the money there in the person's name. That's what we see. Some top politicians who are criminals. Even some gangsters do also they use fronts to clean up their money and all of that. Yeah. It's really, really hard to imagine the debt with which this travels. But now I'll also talk about the Nigerian perspective and how I'm sure that you've followed the last few weeks some of the conversations that we've had on persons with very questionable past that have links with drug lords and drug dealings, have links with terrorism, have links with money laundering but still somehow some way find themselves into either political officers here in Nigeria or just become very popular names here in Nigeria. So share your thoughts on what this really, really tells about the Nigerian mentality to wealth and the Nigerian mentality basically to these type of stories. Well, I mean I've been a journalist since 2008 and this is a problem that we face as journalists every time. We are not happy that the government would do a story. I did a lot of expos, I've done several stories, you know. Before I ran to the UK and was arrested and was jailed for 13 years and all of that. We were really expose on Ibori in Nigeria and the government of the day at the time never arrested him or he was never, I mean persecuted in Nigeria but he wasn't really on the left, you know. So this is what happened. That's why we need to have institutions that are not politically connected. So like the office of the AGM should be independent, truly independent so independent even the president should not have powers to appoint the AGM. If you want to, I mean the office of the AGM and the office of the Justice Minister should be separated and the office of the AGM should be open to which you apply like you're applying for a job and which you sit down and even like in the US people actually vote to appoint state deputy attorneys. We should have a system in Nigeria if it's going to aid the independence of some of this law enforcement agency but sadly that is not the case here. I also want you to share your thoughts on what the reaction you expect would be in other climes. Because like I said I've listened to different conversations and podcasts from international media organizations. I also heard someone asking the British Prime Minister certain questions with regards to certain places where he might also have been named. Why would you compare the reaction in other climes to the reaction here in Nigeria? And do you think Pandora papers will basically make a lot of difference in other places? Well they go by what we have seen in the past Panama papers, we saw results we saw people arrested, people resigning in other places but not in Nigeria. It's sad. I would expect that people are resigning in other places people are arrested and prosecuted in other places and I expect that to happen in Nigeria as well. We hope that civil civil society organizations and NGO we pick it from where we stopped. We are not activists, we are not going to protest or arrest anybody. We have done our work stops the moment we publish our work. So we have pressure groups who should take it from where we stopped and put pressure on the government to act. We hope that will happen but if it doesn't happen we have to move on to the next story sadly. What more are we to expect with Pandora papers? I see that there's 10 persons of interest in Nigeria. I think we've currently done the first three or the first four. What more should Nigerians be expecting in the next couple of days? I can't divulge so much of what's coming but you should keep your fingers crossed we are working on something with a popular clergy in the country. We also have some other governors who must have broken the law and the stories that are coming out about them. So keep your fingers crossed and as the stories are released you would know about them. For now I can't type. I can't see more than I have just divulged. Okay. It's a very, very interesting revelations here and there. I'm personally excited to even read these things every day that they drop. Where would you expect the president is there certain things that you would expect from him seeing these things drop and of course seeing that his name has also been mentioned? I don't know. We sent questions to his spokesperson and they never got back to the response. So they didn't think about it. He's not that much culpable as in opening an offshore account or something. He's not that his team didn't do their due diligence before he went to proceed somebody in a property that the government has actually secured if he's ordered on. So which is sad. But he ends there. We don't know maybe tomorrow we may get a document because we have to dig into those documents. We get a document that directly, I mean, indicts the president. So it's also right. Okay. All right. Nicola Cibicui, thank you very much for your time this morning. I'm going to force right after work today look through today's Prime Minister's Exposure and Pandora papers and see what more information I need to gather. But thanks very much for your time and for the work that you do. Thank you very much for having me. Absolutely. All right. Stay with us here on the breakfast. We'll take a short break when we come back. The breakfast, of course we will be wrapping up this morning.