Tribunal never found me guilty – Atiku fires back at APC PCC over Mambilla

Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has accused the All Progressives Congress Presidential Campaign Council (APC PCC) of deliberately distorting the outcome of the Mambilla arbitration, insisting that the ruling party took a tribunal award, “amputated its legal meaning, stuffed the gaps with political propaganda” and presented the result to Nigerians as a corruption verdict against him when no such verdict was delivered.

In a statement issued by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, on Friday in response to an earlier statement by the APC PCC, the presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress ADC, said the APC’s distortion rested on “a false and intellectually lazy assumption” that because he served as Vice President in the Obasanjo administration, every action taken by that government must automatically be attributed to him.

He argued that history disproved this, as he had openly opposed the controversial third-term project pursued under the same administration without being treated as complicit simply by virtue of his office.

“The same principle applies to Mambilla. I was not a member of the technical process that evaluated the competing proposals and recommended Sunrise. I did not sit on the procurement panel. I did not award the contract. So anyone alleging that I manipulated that process has a simple responsibility: show the instruction I gave, show the intervention I made, and show the paragraph of the tribunal award where that corrupt influence was found”, he said.

Challenging the APC to produce the exact portion of the final award where the tribunal found that he collected a $500,000 bribe, instructed former Power Minister Olu Agunloye to award the Mambilla contract to Sunrise, abused his office or participated in a corrupt conspiracy, Atiku declared flatly: “There is no such finding.”

He accused the APC of converting “suspicion into guilt, an unexplained transaction into a proven bribe, and an allegation canvassed before arbitrators into a verdict the arbitrators themselves never delivered,” describing this as “not an interpretation of the award” but “a political fabrication.”

According to Atiku, the tribunal examined the $500,000 transferred by Leno Adesanya through China Castle Investments to Jennifer Douglas, rejected Adesanya’s explanation that it arose from a foreign-exchange transaction, and expressed concerns about the absence of documentary evidence supporting that explanation, but he stressed that rejecting Adesanya’s explanation was “fundamentally different” from finding that Atiku received a bribe or corruptly used his office to secure the Sunrise contract.

“The APC cannot manufacture the missing finding simply because the actual award does not provide the political conclusion it desperately wants,” he said, adding that if the tribunal had wanted to find that the $500,000 was a bribe paid to him, or that he abused his office to procure the contract, “it could have said so plainly.”

Atiku also rejected the assertion that he “chose to stay away” after being summoned by the tribunal, clarifying: “I was not a party to the arbitration and I did not testify before the tribunal. The reported contents of the award do not establish that the tribunal summoned me, ordered me to testify or found that I disobeyed any directive to appear.”

He noted that while former Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Muhammadu Buhari, along with former ministers Babatunde Fashola and Suleiman Adamu, participated in Nigeria’s defence, their appearance could not reasonably be transformed into evidence that he himself had been summoned and refused to appear.

Atiku pointed out that the arbitration proceedings were strictly between Sunrise Power and Transmission Company Limited, Leno Adesanya and the Federal Republic of Nigeria, noting that the tribunal dismissed Sunrise’s claims and ordered Sunrise and Adesanya to reimburse Nigeria for 75 per cent of its legal fees and expenses, with no damages, costs or other liability imposed on him personally.

Drawing a contrast with President Bola Tinubu’s own United States court record, Atiku said: “In my case, my accusers are struggling to turn an allegation considered in the Mambilla arbitration into a finding the tribunal has not been shown to have made. In President Tinubu’s 1993 United States case, however, the matter did not end with an allegation. It moved from allegation to settlement, and from settlement to a formal judicial decree.”

He cited the October 4, 1993 ruling by Judge John A. Nordberg of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, which ordered the forfeiture of $460,000 held in an account in Tinubu’s name, on grounds that the funds “represent proceeds of narcotics trafficking or were involved in financial transactions” in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§1956 and 1957, while acknowledging that “it was a civil forfeiture proceeding against property, not a criminal conviction of Bola Tinubu personally for drug trafficking.”

Atiku insisted that “the same standard must apply to everyone,” challenging his accusers to “stop the political theatre, produce the exact paragraph and allow Nigerians to read it for themselves” if the tribunal had made any finding against him comparable to the Tinubu forfeiture decree.

He listed a series of specific challenges to the APC, including identifying the paragraph where the tribunal found that he solicited or received a bribe, instructed Agunloye to award the contract to Sunrise, or was culpable of corruption in relation to the project, stressing: “These are not questions of political opinion.

They are questions of record. They have factual answers. If the APC has those paragraphs, it should publish them in full and allow Nigerians to read the words of the tribunal themselves.”

Atiku said the controversy should not distract Nigerians from issues that would ultimately decide the 2027 election, including the cost of living, jobs, security and the consequences of the Tinubu administration’s economic policies, adding: “Nigerians can read. Nigerians can distinguish allegation from adjudication. And Nigerians should not be asked to surrender their judgment to campaign propaganda.”

He insisted that until the APC produces the portions of the award it claims support its accusation, it should stop “dressing campaign allegations in the robes of an international tribunal”.

“An allegation is not a finding. Suspicion is not proof. The rejection of one man’s explanation is not the conviction of another man. And no amount of political repetition can write into an arbitral award a verdict that the tribunal itself did not deliver”, he added.