Enabling African loots: Tracking the laundering of Nigerian kleptocrats’ ill-gotten gains in the United Kingdom

There is an increasing understanding, in both academic literature and policy discourse, that the issue of grand corruption affecting developing countries cannot be addressed without considering the Western ‘enablers’ of corruption (Bullough 2019; Cooley et al. 2018; UN 2020). This is because the kleptocrats looting their countries need the help of firms and actors residing in the West to hide their money and prosper in the long run. However, empirical academic works outlining how this occurs, and with which consequences, are still lacking. The objective of this article is to flesh out of the value chain of service provision going from developing, resource-rich countries, to Western boutique firms or 'rogue' service providers, and ultimately reaching out to the large blue-chip firms. The paper aims to provide an explanation of the 'conveyor belt' that allows Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) to rehabilitate their money in the West, while inserting Nigerian material in contemporary debates. The research questions tackled are: 1) Why is the regulatory system in the West still not efficient enough to stop enabling practices? 2) How does this bridge between the three steps occur? 3) What is it that makes these 'fixers' acceptable to blue chip companies? To answer these complex questions, we build on incipient and developing literature on enablers (Harrington 2016; Heathershaw, Mayne and Lewis 2020) and flip the angle of analysis from the service providers to the PEPs themselves, in order to appreciate the loopholes that an often-adopted institutionalist perspective, on its own, might not be able to catch. To these ends, the article traces the trajectory of established money laundering practices by focusing on three in-depth case studies of Nigerian PEPs and their enablers: James Ibori, Dan Etete and Alison Diezani-Madueke. Data collection has been carried out through the close reading of documents, including court proceedings, interview transcripts and land registry records, and complemented by semi-structured interviews with investigators and experts. We use an interpretive practice tracing methodology to elucidate and test the steps leading to money-laundering. Our findings show that the ‘rogue operators’ explanation is insufficient: once the groundwork of the ‘boutique’ actors legitimises the PEP’s actions, larger firms willingly take on board the business. Furthermore, we show that the problem is wider than the ‘conventional’ enablers: we pinpoint professional figures who are not conventionally treated as enablers, but who are nevertheless instrumental in the accumulation of illegal gain and money laundering. By adopting the actors’ perspective and by drawing on rich qualitative data (some of it previously unavailable to the public), the article is able to contribute to the understanding of the political economy of Nigeria as seen in a global context, as well as to analytically document the interaction of Western firms and individuals with PEPs from developing countries. This gives rise to policy-relevant insights on how to identify and stop such instances from occurring in the future, while providing a starting point for comparisons with contextual work on different geographies.