Attorney-client confidentiality is the lifeblood of lawyering. I can tell you for free that, whatever the state of their current bank balance, Mossack Fonseca is no longer the 4th largest law firm in the world. They're not even a law firm anymore. They're a corporate train wreck now. Ironic that, in the same week their firm name achieved global street level name recognition, they also achieved the dubious distinction of being THE law firm that couldn't keep its clients secrets.
The humblest Nigerian charge-and bail has the advantage on that tax-dodging behemoth on that score. He may blurt out all the sleazy details of your ongoing divorce to his drinking buddies at the local pepper-soup joint, but they won't end up uploaded in an internet file available for download by every half-starved blogger and government sleuth with a grudge against you. The concept of the paperless office is yet to catch up with us yet. Our files are real files, those foldable manilla receptacles into which we shove reams of neatly typed A4 paper, to be locked away safely in steel cabinets. And in these dark days when NEPA is immune to Uncle Bubu's body language and fuel for generators has become an unconscionable business expense, it makes sense to have one or two Olympia typewriters on permanent standby to type out motions and letters in case the business centre across the road closes down on hardship grounds. Let even the NSA try hacking into that!
In fact, the biggest problem the Naija lawyer faces? His client. If it's not an inferiority complex, what exactly do Saraki, David Mark, and Danjuma need the services of an international law firm specialising in setting up offshore tax shelters for? It's not as if they've ever been required in Nigeria to pay one anini of tax on their looted funds. And if it comes to washing and moving dirty money across international frontiers, I doubt if there is anything Mossack Fonseca can teach the Nigerian legal fraternity about rikishi, wuruwuru, jibiti, agbari, or any of the dark arts necessary for carrying on skulduggery for the benefit of a shady client. And we're a million times more affordable. How much was he paid, that young lawyer who mightily embarrassed APC by registering a mushroom political party under an identical acronym with INEC before APC bigwigs woke up to the realisation that they were supposed to have registered their party name with INEC before going on the street to make noise? Something like 80K? Around 200 quid, give or take. Probably less than what the lowliest associate at Mossack Fonseca charges per hour just for looking at your file.
Our unthinking prejudice in favour of everything foreign is what informed James Ibori’s choice of London-based Bhadresh Gohil to help launder his princely lootings from the coffers of Delta State. Bhadresh Gohil, a crook solicitor so incompetent in his ambitious thievery that he couldn’t even properly hide his assets from his wife in his notorious divorce case. Gohil it was, who in 2005, concocted an outrageous scheme on behalf of Ibori and the then governor of Akwa Ibom State, Obong Victor Attah, to create a dummy company called ADF to offer totally unnecessary consultancy services in respect of the sale of shares in V-Mobile being held by their respective states and charge astronomical fees totaling $37 million for the service, money that was immediately swooped upon by Ibori and his co-conspirators. Unfortunately, it was also the same Gohil that Scotland Yard targeted in its investigation of Ibori’s money laundering activities, and from the hiding place in his office that the evidence that nailed Ibori in the Southwark Crown Court was seized.
Ibori forgot in his goggle-eyed admiration of UK based thieving expertise, that Gohil, based as he was in the UK was operating from a legal environment where a phone call to the right quarters or an invocation of the magic Nigerianism ‘Oga is interested in the case’ would have no dampening effect n the enthusiasm of the police in hunting down evidence of financial crime. A Nigerian lawyer would have known which judge had funeral expenses to take care of as a result of a tragic death in the family and generously reached out a helping financial hand to the learned justice (God forbid that any inference of undue influence be drawn therefrom!)A Nigerian lawyer would have been as adept in siphoning funds through bogus fees: some have been known to charge upwards of N200 million for mere routine tasks like company formation; fees paid out of public funds and no doubt appropriately divvied up between the public official giving out the brief and the obliging solicitor. The whole concept of laundering Nigerian funds is a suspect one anyway; there is no real need to squirrel your stolen money out of a country where material success is all that matters to an adoring populace that envies your good luck, and any discussion of the criminality of your behavior is treated as a virulent case of ‘bad-belleh.’ Say instead of taking your money out to buy golf courses in England and oil refineries in Argentina, you use it to set up sprawling shopping malls in Nigeria, there are those who will sincerely hail you for creating hundreds of minimum wage jobs with their stolen patrimony that properly ought to have gone into the training of our future doctors, teachers and engineers. No, it is always the foreign that intoxicates our looters. It is not surprising that, to now compound Ibori’s financial woes, his name has also cropped up in this Panama Papers expose.
An ingenious local lawyer would probably have advised Saraki if consulted on the problem of hiding away his loot, for the price of a second-hand Hummer jeep: 'My able Senator, it's not hard. Recruit two dozen of your loyal vuvuzelas on Facebook to help you dig a sixty-meter soak-away pit in your backyard. Get them to bury all the money inside it.' And how to maintain their silence after the fact, loyal or no loyal? A wolfish grin: 'After they bury the money in the pit, you invite them to demonstrate their unflinching loyalty to you by burying themselves inside as well. If they agree, problem solved. If they don't, that is proof that they really aren't loyal to you. Bury them yourself inside the pit.' A sound plan that could only possibly have been rejected if Saraki has something resembling a conscience. Which he hasn't. You might say he is paying the price of failing to buy naija to grow the naira. Patronise Nigerian lawyers!
My name is Peter Oshun, and I knew the difference between commonsense and arrant nonsense before the invention of Twitter.