The UK Southwark Crown Court on Tuesday heard audio recordings of former Nigerian petroleum minister Diezani Alison-Madueke allegedly confronting two oil tycoons from whom she is accused of accepting bribes.
Mrs Alison-Madueke is currently standing trial on bribery charges. PREMIUM TIMES reported earlier that she faces six charges, including five counts of accepting bribes and one count of conspiracy to commit bribery. All the charges are linked to the award of oil and gas contracts during her time in office.
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The alleged recordings were found in a Samsung phone, which was seized from the former minister when she was arrested in London in 2015.
The BBC reported that the device contained audio recordings of conversations that Mrs Alison-Madueke had with Olajide Omokore and also with Kolawole Aluko, the year before it was seized.
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This was also before she fell out with both parties.
In one of the recordings, a conversation with Mr Omokore, she was heard saying, “I will be happy to escort all of you to jail along with myself.”
“We who are managing the thing have kept quiet. We’ve kept quiet… while people like your wife are busy singing all over the place.”
“I do not react well to being blackmailed.”
In the second recording, which captured her conversation with Mr Aluko, she expressed concerns about the tycoon’s lavish lifestyle and criticised his relationship with British supermodel Naomi Campbell.
She warned him to be careful and not to draw the attention of intelligence agencies to himself.
“As far as everybody’s concerned, you’re a playboy.
“Naomi Campbell, these are not the people for you to be parading… Other men do these things, but they don’t parade them. They do them quietly because the time for parading these things was not now,” she said, according to The BBC.
She also told him that she was “really annoyed” to hear “this takes her down, and information that you have on me”.
“I will be happy to escort all of you to jail along with myself,” she added. “You will be shocked at what I will do because when it comes to that, I will come out and tell the Nigerian people this is what happened.
“Oh yes, I will blame myself… but I will come out openly and say it so they can judge me openly. And then all of us go and sit at the gate. Let us see who survived, me or you.”
READ ALSO: How Diezani Alison-Madueke’s ‘lavish’ UK life was funded by Nigerian oil contractors – Prosecutor
To this, Mr Aluko responded by saying: “I never ever mentioned your name or any other name.”
He told her he was “loyal like a dog,” and that he had placed some material in a safety deposit box, including “whatever I thought could save me, what could save me from jail.”
PREMIUM TIMES reported that investigators accused Mrs Alison-Madueke of living a “lavish lifestyle” sponsored by the oil tycoons.
She was accused of purchasing high-end accessories using a payment card owned by Mr Aluko. Some purchases were also made with his company’s debit card, Tenka Limited.
Mrs Alison-Madueke has denied the multiple charges against her.
Her lawyer, Jonathan Laidlaw, also rejected the allegations that she exercised decisive control over major oil sector deals.
He told the court that she was only a ‘rubber stamp’ when she served as oil minister in the Goodluck Jonathan administration.
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