I lived in London in 2006 when the largest to-date cash robbery in that country – and perhaps in the world – happened.
It was the robbery of the Tonbridge, Kent facility of the Bank of England by a team of blaggers (that’s how they call thieves in Britain), which included fighter Lee Murray, Lea Rusha and a couple of Albanians.
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53 million pounds sterling was hauled from that facility after they tied up the workers there. Emir Hysenaj, one of the Albanians, was the inside man who provided the logistics and coordinates. I remember the situation very vividly till date and even then I knew it was a matter of time before the gang was caught and the plot unraveled. Britain is not where you could walk to a bar/pub and spend 2,000 pounds ‘declaring’ drinks for everyone without being surveilled and picked up in a short period of time. No one sees that kind of cash and many people are snoops. No one spends lavishly like we do here. And so, under two days, arrests were made in Forest Hill London. The money was just too much to handle. The robbers abandoned one of the vans they used in a hotel in Ashford, with 1.3 million pounds in it. This was discovered on the 26th of February, 2006, while the robbery took place on the 23rd of February. By the 27th of February, 2006, the truck used for the robbery was discovered at Elderden Farm in Welling, owned by car dealer John Fowler. Earlier, on the 25th of February, 2006, the gang leader, Lee Murray had been arrested in a shopping mall in Rabat, Morocco. However, even though all the parties involved have been apparently jailed, with a few of those arrested acquitted, more than 32 million pounds from the entire haul of 53 million pounds is yet unaccounted for till date.
Before the Tonbridge incident, the largest cash robbery was thought to be that of the Northern Bank in Belfast, where in 2004, the sum of 26.5 million pounds was stolen. But some pundits put the largest-ever theft of cash at 1 billion dollars, stolen from the Central Bank of Iraq in 2003, upon the invasion of that country by the almighty USA. That one did not need robbers, since the Americans had deliberately sent that country back to the Dark Ages and so any and everyone did what they liked. Also notable was the Brinks-Mat gold bullion robbery, which took place at the Heathrow International Trading Estate in London in November 1983. Twenty six million pounds worth of gold bullion, diamonds and cash was moved in that robbery when six robbers attacked the facility. In the year 2000, police foiled a 350 million pounds diamond heist at London Millennium Dome, which would have set a record. Later in 2015, over the Easter holiday, some thieves abseiled down a lift shaft at Hatton Garden Safety Deposit Limited and made away with approximately 200 million pounds worth of diamonds, rare jewels and gold. The perpetrators were rounded up within a month. All British. The Americans are no pushovers. There was the Loomis Fargo bank heist in 1997, where $25.9 million was stolen and the Dunbar Armoured robbery in Los Angeles in the same year where $29 million was hijacked, among others. Elsewhere in the world, there was the Agric Bank of China fraud worth $9.5 million, the NOKAS cash-handling facility robbery in Norway where $13.5 million was stolen in 2004, the Bank Central burglary in Fortaleza, Brazil, where $55 million was stolen in 2005, the Swiss Post heist of 1997 where $55 million worth of unregistered and uninsured cash was stolen in 1997 and the heist at Harry’s, the Parisian jeweler where $108 million worth of goods were hauled in 2008.
But like in many things amazing and fantastic, Nigeria is struggling to take the cake. How can we forget Chief Emmanuel Nwude, Ezenwamadu, who sold a non-existent airport for $303 million to Bank Noroeste, Brazil, in the year 1997. He extracted $242 million from that bank before the bubble burst. The Nwude case, I believe, is still on, decades after. It just may never conclude. Nigeria has also developed a reputation with the 419 culture and of late, yahoo-yahoo boys, Business Email Compromise (BEC), benefit frauds and whatnot, with guys like Hushpuppi, that SA to the Ogun State governor and many more putting us on the ignoble map. Leadership crises over the years have resulted in a rudderless population busy engaged in anything just to find some money.
In spite of all this, what could probably be the largest imagined heist of all times has landed in Nigeria. I first got to know of this incidence through one of Simon Kolawole’s writeups, which I read severally with mouth agape and then shared. I then decided to use my knowledge of banking operations and Nigerian banking history to interpret the events and I was wowed!
The story goes that sometime in 1993 under the reign of the great king General Sani Abacha, one Prince Isaac Okpala approached the government and promised to build three spanking new oil refineries in Nigeria. Abacha said ‘ok, I have no objection, go ahead please’. For, Nigeria could never have too many refineries and of course our refineries were already giving us loads of issues by then. The company, Prince Okpala ran was called Petro Union Oil and Gas Limited. The Prince (Please, take your mind away from the Nigerian Prince taught in financial markets today as part of antifraud training and let us assume he was a real prince), promised to bring in much foreign investment for these three refineries. He said he had foreign partners and mentioned Gazeaft UK Limited – a company that he happened to own and control. Next was that he appointed one Gladstone Kukoyi and Associates, Chartered Accountants and decided to show ‘transparency’ that he already had all the required funds needed to build all three refineries sitting coolly in his Gazeaft UK Ltd account, by writing a single cheque of 2.5 billion pounds sterling in favour of this accountant – Mr Kukoyi. No, he didn’t want the money in his own account as that wasn’t transparent enough. The accountant deposited the cheque in his own account at a bank on Broad Street, Lagos. Recall that Nwude of the Brazilian Noroeste Bank fame, was later (or once) a director at the same bank, but there is no connection with this other caper. Anyway, come along with me.
See you next week.
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