Decade-long UK corruption case collapses as former Nigerian oil minister cleared

Diezani Alison-Madueke was cleared by a London jury on Wednesday of all six bribery charges against her, dealing a heavy blow to UK authorities who had spent more than a decade pursuing one of their highest-profile corruption cases, Financial Times reported. Jurors at Southwark Crown Court returned not-guilty verdicts after more than 46 hours of deliberation, acquitting Nigeria’s former oil minister of five counts of accepting bribes and one count of conspiracy to commit bribery, covering 2011 to 2015.

Speaking after the verdicts, the former OPEC president said she was deeply relieved, describing eleven years of what she called relentless and unjust scrutiny. “My name is cleared. This nightmare is over,” she said. Her lawyers added that, having endured years separated from her family, she could now resume her life with her reputation restored.

Two co-defendants were acquitted alongside her: Nigerian oil executive Olatimbo Ayinde, 54, and her brother, the bishop Doye Agama, 69. All three had pleaded not guilty.

The case was brought by the National Crime Agency, which had investigated for more than a decade before she was charged in 2023; she had been on bail since her arrest in October 2015. Prosecutors, led by Alexandra Healy KC, alleged that oil and gas figures seeking lucrative contracts had funded “a life of luxury” for her in London — among the claims were £100,000 in cash, chauffeur-driven cars, private jet flights, refurbishment and staff costs at London properties, school fees for her son, and luxury goods from stores including Harrods and Louis Vuitton. The court heard that businessman Kolawole Aluko alone was alleged to have spent more than £2 million at Harrods. The benefits, prosecutors said, were linked to figures connected to the Atlantic Energy and SPOG Petrochemical groups, whose companies had secured contracts with Nigeria’s state oil corporation.

Taking the stand at 65, Alison-Madueke answered the allegations directly. The items, she said, were never bribes: executives had extended loans she repaid in full, her Nigerian cards had frequently failed, and carrying cash was impractical. Receipts proving repayment, she said, had disappeared during what she described as a politically motivated raid on her Abuja home. She also told jurors she had limited control over contract awards, which she said passed through multiple agencies and were largely handled by the management of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, with the ministry playing a supervisory role. Far from a grafter, she cast herself as a reformer made into a scapegoat — the first woman to run the sector, she said, in a deeply patriarchal industry where her efforts to break entrenched interests made her a target. She told the court her family had been intimidated and her sister kidnapped.

Her lead counsel, Jonathan Laidlaw KC of 2 Hare Court — a financial-crime specialist and former First Senior Treasury Counsel at the Old Bailey — mounted a forceful attack on the integrity of the case. He pointed to a “gross delay” in bringing charges, argued that material capable of establishing her innocence had been lost, and accused investigators of selective prosecution, noting that several wealthy businessmen said to have paid bribes were never charged. He told jurors that records key to her defense had vanished, partly because British authorities had held her passport since 2015, and challenged the prosecution’s reliance on evidence from Nigeria’s anti-graft agency: “Either you trust the EFCC, or you don’t,” he said.

The judge’s directions reflected the difficulty prosecutors faced. Mrs Justice Justine Thornton told jurors that if they accepted her expenses may have been properly reimbursed, then her conduct was not improper.

The cases against the two co-defendants also fell apart. Ayinde, whom Nigerian officials had at one point portrayed as a whistleblower, was accused of handing payment cards to an associate who bought luxury goods for Alison-Madueke; her barrister, Jonathan Lennon KC, said there was no evidence she had provided them for any such purpose. Agama, a bishop at a Manchester-based Pentecostal church, was accused of receiving money channeled through businessman Benedict Peters. His barrister, Tom Price KC, dismissed the prosecution’s case as “purely circumstantial,” maintaining that the funds were transparent donations from a Christian philanthropist.

The trial, which began in January and ran for about five months, was watched as a test of Britain’s ability to pursue alleged foreign corruption. A written statement from former president Goodluck Jonathan, read to the court, said it was not unusual for third parties to cover payments for ministers on official trips abroad, and that he had approved her use of private jets for state travel.

Both the Crown Prosecution Service and the National Crime Agency said they respected the jury’s verdict. Zainab Saleem of the campaign group Spotlight on Corruption called the result a major blow that left the agency empty-handed in one of its highest-profile cases, adding that it showed how hard it is to prosecute alleged corruption involving political elites.