Allies of the former minister, prosecutors said, set up companies after Mrs. Alison-Madueke took office and got contracts to trade hefty oil allocations on global markets. Diezani Alison-Madueke, Nigeria’s former minister of petroleum resources, was part of a grand kickback scheme involving officials of state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and middlemen that delivered mouth-watering deals to foreign oil companies by softening the contracts’ terms, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing Anthony Stimler, a former trader with Glencore, a Swiss-based commodity trading firm, Mr Stimler, himself a subject of a related graft case being heard in the U.S., has named seven other accomplices, four of whom are four Glencore traders who partook in making bribe payment,
and a prominent oil trader from Africa, whose involvement in the bribery conspiracy predates Mr Stimler’s, reaching back to the 1990s. Court papers seen by BNNBloomberg noted Mr Stimler and the unnamed seven used “inflated and fraudulent invoices” to “disguise the nature and purpose of bribe payments made to government officials.”
