Boko Haram: U.S. Congress moves to use Abacha loot for victims

Families of the 219 abducted schoolgirls from Chibok, Borno State may get financial backing if a piece of legislation sails through in the United States of America Congress.
Congress is considering a bill which will compel setting aside all, or part of the late Gen. Sani Abacha’s loot recovered in that country, for victims of Boko Haram in Nigeria.
The proposed legislation would allow President Barack Obama and the US government set aside recovered Abacha loot in the U.S and deploy same for victims of insurgency in the North East.
In a report monitored on Premium Times, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee is sponsoring the bill, H.R. 528, which would allow the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) to use money from recovered Abacha loot that is in its custody to provide relief for families of the abducted Chibok girls.
Speaking on Wednesday, at a congressional sub  committee hearing on U.S’s role in helping Nigeria confront Boko Haram and other threats in Northern Nigeria, Ms. Lee sought the committee’s support for her bill.
“I have HR 528 which I would like to bring to the committee’s attention,” she said, giving the title of the bill as “Victims of Terror Protection Act” and added, “it deals with the Abacha loot which the DOJ has.”
Ms. Lee was one of 10 people who spoke at the hearing, including one of the Chibok girls who escaped from Boko Haram on the night of April 14, 2014 when they were kidnapped. The congresswoman, who reportedly visited Nigeria on a fact-finding mission a few weeks after the kidnapping, said the bill was motivated by the plight of the families of the kidnapped girls and that the intention was to create a relief fund for them and other victims of insurgency. When we were in Nigeria two years ago, families were still in pain, they are still in limbo. Boko Haram has killed Muslims, Christians and others; they’ve killed and burned mosques and churches and homes and schools,” she said.
She said while the overall question remained what we can do to bring the girls back, “there are broken families out there” and she believed the DOJ “can begin to utilize that money asap” to provide the relief these
families desperately need.
The U.S. was one of the earliest destinations late Sani Abacha and his family chose for their illegally acquired wealth.
Mohammed Abacha and his late brother, Ibrahim, opened accounts with Citibank, New York, in 1992 using the aliases Chinquinto, Gelsobella and Navarrio.
Three years later, they opened a business account with the name Morgan Procurement. The Abachas gave a US-French citizen, named Alain Ober, power of attorney over their New York and London bank accounts.
By 1999 when a U.S. Senate Committee began investigating Abacha loot, the accounts had recorded more than $110 million transactions including $47 million that passed through the New York accounts within six months and $37 million found in one account in 1995.
Mr. Ober and other officials of Citibank testified before the U.S. Senate back in 1999, admitting to moving money for the Abachas but claiming that they were not aware of their clients’ true identity.