It must have been a disorienting moment for Sakaguchi – a supremely successful international banker who had previously run one of Brazil’s most influential banks in New York and who felt comfortable at ministerial level meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; a man regarded by all as hyper-efficient, with no trace of personal vanity but equally lacking in human warmth; and a man who for fourteen years had enjoyed absolute control of Banco Noroeste’s overseas accounts. Now he cowered at the fury of Lopez and muttered quietly, ‘You know, I have always had gambling in my blood.’ Then he broke down and was finally compelled to show the figures. For the first time in anyone’s memory, Mr. Sakaguchi was no longer in control.

In reality, matters had slipped out of Sakaguchi’s hands three years earlier, on the day his department received a fax from a certain Mr. Tafida Williams, the Director for Budget and Planning at Nigeria’s Ministry of Aviation. In the fax, Mr. Williams explained that a Nigerian customer of Banco Noroeste had suggested that the bank might be interested in an investment possiblity with the Ministry of Aviation.. The customer was indeed well-known to Mr. Sakaguchi and so he read the Nigerians’ offer with interest. A unique and very lucrative opportunity had arisen, Mr Williams explained. In 1991, the Nigerian government had moved the country’s capital from Lagos to Abuja and the time had come to create a major new airport to service the needs of the fastest growing city in Africa’s most populous country. The Aviation Ministry and the Central Bank of Nigeria were now looking for external investors in the airport project. The rates of return, Mr Williams intimated, would be highly attractive. Shrewd banker that he was, Nelson Sakaguchi replied to the fax saying that his company would like to explore the possibility of cooperation.

Before long, a limousine was whisking Sakaguchi from Heathrow Airport to a swish hotel in central London to discuss the proposal with a heavyweight delegation from Nigeria. As he entered the hotel suite, an elegant, slightly thick-set man handed him his card, ‘Paul Ogwuma, Director - Central Bank of Nigeria.’ Although Sakaguchi had never met Nigeria’s most senior banker, Ogwuma’s reputation in the world of international finance was solid. And he was there with his deputy, his deputy’s wife and a senior representative of Nigeria’s Aviation Ministry. The atmosphere at the meeting was both cordial and businesslike.

Sakaguchi may have seen himself as a risk taker but he had never played for such high stakes. The Nigerians were seeking about $50 million for the airport and Banco Noroeste’s capital only totalled $500 million. But the potential profits from the deal were enormous. Before long, he had authorised the first transfer of $4 million dollars and there was more to come.

As he awaited trial on charges of criminal conspiracy in his modest, neat home in Coita, just outside Sao Paolo, Nelson Sakaguchi denied that he had noticed anything fishy about the Nigerian deal. To this day, he swears he had no idea that his main business partner in the Abuja airport scheme was in fact Chief Emmanuel Nwude. Although uneducated and described by one lawyer as ‘a thug,’ Nwude demonstrated confidence and ability in wriggling around the sewers of Nigeria’s corruptocracy. He was a successful businessman but he was not, as he claimed at that London meeting, Paul Ogwuma, the Director of the Central Bank of Nigeria.

Everyone agrees that Sakaguchi was the victim of the most monumental fraud but nobody understands why such an experienced banker would fall for the scam, nor why he filched his employer’s money in the process. In charge of Noroeste’s overseas accounts in the Cayman islands, Sakaguchi is accused by the bank’s lawyers of having skimmed hundreds of millions of dollars from them between 1995 and 1997 in order to pass it on to Nigeria. Each transfer was made in parcels of less than $6 million. Had he gone over that figure, he would have required a higher authorization. Sakaguchi dispatched the money through dizzyingly circuitous routes in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Hong Kong, and the United States.

In Nigeria alone, 17 different banks were used to shuffle and disguise the money. But despite the huge sums and their unusual passage around the world, nobody thought fit to raise the much hailed red flags of the Western banking system. Lloyds and CitiBank in Switzerland proved eager if unwitting facilitators of the scam, ignoring much of their standard good practices in order to satisfy these very rich customers. ‘Without any doubt,’ said Noroeste’s asset recovery lawyer in Sao Paolo, Domingos Refinetti, ‘Lloyds and then Citibank broke all possible rules existing at that time about opening accounts, receiving money, sending money…There is no way that you deal with Nigeria and not at least consider the possible illegal origin of those funds. $70 million went in and out of Lloyds in a period of one year; $50 through Citibank in a period of months…The banks just waved it through and shut their eyes.’

From the banks, the tens of millions of dollars went into the pockets of Nwude and his main associates, the husband and wife team, Christian Ikechukwu Anajemba and Amaka Anajemba. They embarked on a game of global Monopoly, building palaces in Nigeria, buying real estate in Redondo and Huntingdon Beaches, California, and investing in an impressive array of properties in North London. They were good investors. ‘It made our job easier when it came to getting the money back,’ noted Keith Oliver the London assets recovery lawyer. ‘The houses had increased in value so much that we were able to cover a good deal more than we had at first anticipated.’

While the motives of the Nigerian scammers were never in doubt, Sakaguchi’s gullibility beggars belief. There is no evidence to suggest that he was in league with the scammers – he was a genuine victim. But he was funding this wild gamble with somebody else’s money. Thousands, if not millions of man hours have gone into the Noroeste investigation which remains one of the largest bank heists in history. And yet not a single lawyer, judge, policeman, fraudster, friend or spiritual adviser of Nelson Sakaguchi can answer the two central questions: why did he do it? And how was he taken in?

Every time Nelson Sakaguchi transferred another $3-4 million, he expected the returns to start rolling in. Instead, Chief Nwude and his accomplices requested a further payment in order to pay for fabricated legal fees or bribes. And as his losses mounted, so did the compulsion to pay out more millions in the hope of retrieving the ever greater sum invested. At some point in any 419 scam, the anxiety must mingle with a thickening despair that leads straight to a living hell. Sakaguchi’s response to this descent was to seek advice from macumbe, Brazil’s syncretic religion that melds West African animism with Christianity. Maria Rodriguez was a macumba priestess who Sakaguchi was wont to consult.

During the lengthy investigations into the Banco Noroeste affair, Maria Rodriguez introduced some welcome levity for the participants. At one point, the Brazilian Government gave exceptional permission for a Swiss Judge to hold hearings in Brazil to establish whether Sakaguchi and some of the Nigerian conspirators should face trial for money-laundering in Switzerland. (Sakaguchi was eventually convicted and sentenced to 30 months in a Swiss jail). The judge heard testimony from Maria Rodriguez. Domingos Refinetti, representing Banco Noroeste, was present and recalled the scene:

‘I wanted money from Sakaguchi,’ she said, ‘because I needed to buy 120,000 white doves for a particular ritual. By having the pigeons,’ she said, ‘Sakaguchi would be relieved of his problems. Sakaguchi delivered the pigeons.’
‘And how might one keep the pigeons,’ enquired the judge. ‘Surely they were flying all over the place?’
At this point, the judge could contain himself no longer and began laughing. Curiously enough Maria Rodriguez then said that she then asked for money for 120,000 black pigeons. The judge, barely able to control his mirth, said ‘I suppose if you’ve bought up 120,000 white doves, you will have driven up the price and you need to buy the black pigeons in order to restore the equilibrium of in the pigeon futures’ market!’

The cost of the pigeons and the advice were no laughing matter, however. Altogether Sakaguchi siphoned a breathtaking $20 million from the Caymans into Brazil and into the coffers of the late Maria Rodriguez.

Sakaguchi still awaits the outcome of the judicial process in Brazil but he has spent almost two years in a Swiss jail for money-laundering (he was sentenced to 30 months). Ironically, he was found guilty of laundering the very money which the Nigerians were stealing from him. The Swiss authorities were only alerted to the massive fraud being perpetrated through its banking system by the private investigators hired by Banco Noroeste’s owners. The prosecution was successfully and uncovered a significant subsidiary money-laundering crime that was run through India that was hitherto unknown. What failed spectacularly, however, was the banking system’s own detection mechanism. Which is a pity, really, as this is the very heart of the anti-money laundering system in Switzerland and everywhere else in the Western world.

The owners of Banco Noroeste were only able to launch their massive search for the stolen money and their efforts to bring the culprits to justice (Nwude and his gang were eventually imprisoned in Nigeria) because they had large funds at their disposal. Tens of thousands of other victims have been less fortunate. ‘I will not accept a case if it less than $5million, it's not worth the chase,’ is the candid admission of Bill Richey, the US lawyer, who masterminded the whole case against Sakaguchi and Nwude. ‘I'm not going to tell you what the clients have spent here, but they have spent significantly less than half of what we have frozen all around the world. When we finish dealing with the parties in Nigeria and we sue the two Swiss Banks involved, Lloyds Bank and Citibank and we find the final recovery and the case is finally over, I think the clients will probably receive a return of about five to one on their investment.’

Given its historical role as a banking haven, Switzerland has faced the temptation to make vast profits from dubious characters on the one hand and the particular scrutiny both of the United States and the European Union to ensure it limits its role as a money-laundering and tax evasion centre. Bradley Birkenfeld’s deeply embarrassing revelations last year about how UBS hid billions of dollars from Washington’s Internal Revenue Service has done nothing to lift the general suspicion outside Switzerland that the country remains a centre of fraud and double-dealing.

In the last fifteen years, London, New York, Dubai and several other centres have become a target not just for tax evaders but big time criminals as well. But in the first few years after the collapse of communism, the oligarchs, dictators and gangsters of the new world order flocked to Zurich and Switzerland’s other fashionable centres.

Ilja Pawlow, Bulgaria’s most prominent oligarch, set up shop in Zug and Lichtenstein, allegedly channelling tens of millions of dollars from Bulgaria into the Western banking system. The Nazarbeyevs of Kazakhstan and the dreaded Turkenbashi, President Niyazov, shifted billions of dollars of their country’s oil and gas wealth through Switzerland. Around the world, it was often difficult to distinguish between oligarchs, dictators, legitimate businessmen and standout criminals as James Woolsey, the  former chief of the CIA, described to a House of Representatives Committee in Washington in 1999:

If you should chance to strike up a conversation with an articulate, English-speaking Russian in, say, the restaurant of one of the luxury hotels along Lake Geneva, and he is wearing a $3,000 suit and a pair of Gucci loafers, and he
tells you that he is an executive of a Russian trading company and wants to talk to you about a joint venture, then there are four possibilities. He may be what he says he is. He may be a Russian intelligence officer working under commercial cover. He may be part of a Russian organized crime group. But the really interesting possibility is that he may be all three – and that none of those three institutions have any problem with the arrangement.

Regardless of which person he turns out to be, the likelihood is he controls a great deal of money. The time has come for banks and financial institutions not to take the lucre until they really know with whom they are dealing.