Kola Aluko is a big name in Nigeria’s oil industry, but in the United States, to the extent he’s known at all, it’s because of his connections in the entertainment business. The 47-year-old magnate once supposedly courted Naomi Campbell, celebrated a birthday with Leonardo DiCaprio, and rented a yacht to JAY-Z and Beyoncé for her birthday in 2013.
He may have loved the headlines then, but no longer.
Kolawole Akanni Aluko, who now appears to be in hiding, is targeted in two major lawsuits. One has been leveled at him by the U.S. government, which is aiming to auction his $80 million yacht and his $50.9 million One57 penthouse in New York City. The other is brought by the Nigerian government, which intends to recover $1.76 billion from him and his close associate Olajide Omokore.
The suit lodged by the U.S. Justice Department’s Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative claims the full-floor penthouse apartment on Manhattan’s Billionaire’s Row and the yacht which Aluko reportedly rented to JAY-Z and Beyoncé for $900,000 a week, were bought with proceeds from a crooked deal the two businessmen worked out with Nigeria’s then-petroleum minister, Diezani Alison-Madueke, for lucrative oil contracts.
Both lawsuits claim that Aluko and Omokore conspired with others to pay bribes to Alison-Madueke in return for contracts from a subsidiary of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp to shell companies owned by both men.
Despite a lack of qualifications, the companies they set up allegedly received more than $1.5 billion through the sale of crude oil, and often performed no visible services at all in an oil swap arrangement that saw Nigeria use middlemen to sell crude in exchange for refined products. Throughout the period Alison-Madueke served as minister, over 352 million barrels of oil worth about $35 billion (PDF) is estimated to have been channeled into oil swap deals.
According to an affidavit sworn at Nigeria’s Federal High Court by Isaac Kehinde Oginni, a lawyer in the Ministry of Justice, Aluko embarked on a spending spree and acquiring assets in Britain, Canada, the United States, and Switzerland with proceeds from the fraud.
In addition to the One57 penthouse, Aluko allegedly bought properties in the U.S. at 1049 Fifth Avenue, New York; 1948 & 1952 Tolls Avenue, Santa Barbara, California; and several in Los Angeles, including 815 Cima Del Mundo; 755 Sarbonne Road; and 952 North Alpine Drive.
been listed as “out of range,” by MarineTraffic, a community-based project, which provides real-time information on the movements of ships and the current location of ships in harbors and ports. The vessel was last tracked in the Caribbean on May 3.
So perhaps Aluko can live his dream a little longer, until the dozen or so members of the crew demand to be paid, or he runs out of gas money.
https://youtu.be/ZPJR-nhCMqw?si=-YXTDgidJC9fsu5j
https://youtu.be/tl2hGBbtUqk?si=3rACMn2f1lnSudWi
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