USA v. Acct 263226700, et al

Nigerian President-Elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu was named as the owner of several bank accounts that were used to launder money for a heroin distribution network in Chicago, IL in the early 1990s. The members of the heroin ring were criminally charged in a separate case, Northern District of Illinois Case No. 2:92-cr-00113-RL. For unknown reasons, Tinubu was not. Instead, the U.S. Government seized the contents of the bank accounts based on several different seizure warrants across three different dockets, of which this is one. The other two, from 1992, are in the Southern District of New York and a separate docket in the Northern District of Illinois—both with unknown case numbers since the documents pre-date the federal court's PACER system by so many years. In total, about $1.95 million USD was seized from Tinubu's global bank accounts pursuant to these seizure warrants. Of that $1.95 million, about $1.5 million was returned to him while $460,000 was seized and then destroyed. While working for Mobil Oil Company in Nigeria, Tinubu used a variety of shell companies to move the money around, including Compass Finance & Investment Co., incorporated in Washington, D.C., as well as a separate Compass entity incorporated in Nigeria. Though he was not charged, Tinubu committed at least six federal crimes, according to the IRS Special Agent's affidavit in this case: 1) Money laundering (18 U.S.C. § 1956); 2) Using funds from unlawful activity (18 U.S.C. § 1957); 3) Bank fraud (18 U.S.C. § 1344); 4) Failure to file tax returns (26 U.S.C. § 7203); 5) Lying to federal agents (18 U.S.C. § 1001); and 6) Conspiracy (18 U.S.C. § 371). Tinubu was elected to be the next President of Nigeria in February 2023.