ZEENIA NAQVEE FROM DAILY MAIL
A Nigerian bank director managed to outsmart a major local bank out of a whopping £200 million – just by telling the bank he needed the millions to build an airport.
Emmanuel Nwude is actually the former director of the Union Bank of Nigeria – but he channelled his expertise in a less than ethical way, when he called up a Brazilian bank director on behalf of another huge banking figure.
Nwude called Nelson Sakaguchi, of Brazil‘s Banco Noroeste – and pretended to be the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Paul Ogwuma when asking for a huge sum to build an airport.
Shockingly, MailOnline learns that this individual phone call was enough to fulfil Mr Nwude’s requests, and Sakaguchi put full faith in the Nigerian bank director.
Without completing any background checks, Sakaguchi approved Nwude’s demand – but only if he’d get a huge £8m in commission from the new airport – that was never due to be built anyway.
Over a three year period – 1995-1998 – the Brazilian banker paid innocently paid Nwude and his associates a huge sum of approximately £190m – all for the airport that nobody had bothered to check existed.
But one day, in 1997, the Brazilian bank was examining its expenses ahead of being bought by the multinational financial company Santander and noticed that almost half of their money was marinating in the Cayman Islands, a notorious tax haven.
Alarm bells finally started to ring, and Banco Noroeste was let wondering how this all went under the radar.
This instigated legal proceedings which showed that Nwude had in fact defrauded the Brazilian bank of the generous £190m, over the three year period.
Unfortunately, Banco Noroeste was so good-natured that its bank owners ended up paying the costs out of their own pocket, just so Nwude’s sale would be successful – before its 2001 collapse.
Nwude and his associates were taken to court years later, in 2004 and they were chucked out and rearrested, before facing charges in another court.
The fraudsters decided to plead not guilty to over a hundred counts of fraud.
Things got even worse when Nwude tried to get himself out of trouble by bribery, paying £60k when one of his accomplices admitting their wrongdoing.
Despite being another large sum, his bribe was refused – and the trial even got Sakaguchi in as a witness for this, scaring the fraudster into confessing to his crimes.
He ended up pleading guilty in a bid to bag a lighter sentence.
Emmanuel Nwude was sentenced to 25 years for fraud – but was released from prison in 2006.
