With U.S. Consul-General to Nigeria Claire Pierangelo by his side, billionaire Gilbert Chagoury sat atop the dredged plot of land around Lagos on March 31 as they marked the beginning of the construction of the largest consulate in the world.
Jeff Fortenberry, a Republican congressman from Nebraska, resigned from the House of Representatives on that rainy spring day after he was convicted of a felony a week earlier. Illegal campaign contributions from Chagoury were the source of his crime: lying to the FBI.
U.S. ethics groups and Nigerian experts aren’t happy with the decision to put its $537 million consulate on Chagoury’s Eko Atlantic development, which is run by a man convicted of laundering money for a Nigerian dictator and who has admitted to making illegal campaign contributions in the United States.
When the U.S. decided to locate its mega-consulate on Chagoury real estate, “we didn’t have input into that process, or we would have flagged that,” Matthew Page, State Department’s lead intelligence analyst on Nigeria from 2012 to 2015, said phone from Boston on April 11. As Page, now an associate fellow at Chatham House, a London-based international policy think tank, put it: “Either the United States government was incompetent and didn’t do that due diligence or did that due diligence, understood who it was dealing with and disregarded the obvious concerns.”
Gilbert Chagoury, son of Lebanese immigrants grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, where he co-founded the Chagoury Group with his brother in 1971. Construction, real estate, hotels, glass, and flour milling are all part of the conglomerate’s portfolio. Even though the U.S. Justice Department describes him as a “billionaire,” no public records exist that show the extent of his fortune.
It thrived in the 1990s because of its close association with Abacha, described in a Justice Department statement as “one of the most notorious kleptocrats in memory.” The United States announced in 2014 that it had frozen $458 million that Abacha had stolen, the largest kleptocracy forfeiture in the country’s history. After Abacha died in 1998, hundreds of millions more were frozen in Switzerland.
St. Lucia’s ambassador to the Vatican, Chagoury, is a devout Catholic and philanthropist who has worked hard to establish himself as a leader in his country’s philanthropic community.
Following a $460,000 donation to a Democratic Party-linked voter registration group in 1996, he became a top donor to the non-profit Clinton Foundation, giving between $1 million and $5 million, according to the organization’s website, after attending a White House dinner with then-President Bill Clinton.
In February 2013, just weeks after Hillary Clinton’s term as Secretary of State ended, the former president spoke at a dedication ceremony for Eko Atlantic. One of several potential locations for the consulate, according to the State Department’s statement, was Eko Atlantic in 2012. Amnesty International’s mission in Nigeria announced its purchase of approximately 50,000 square meters of land at the development in May of this year.
- Tags: Eko Atlantic, Gilbert Chagoury, Nigeria, US Consulate
