Despite the fact that 10 accounts were connected to Bola Tinubu, the APC presidential candidate, by US authorities in the early 1990s, $460,000 was taken out of one of the accounts as tax on investments held in US banks.
Festus Keyamo, the chief spokesperson for the Tinubu-Shettima Presidential Campaign Council, made this statement on Wednesday’s Politics Today show on Channels Television.
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He was addressing the controversy surrounding a document that was just recently made public by the Northern District of Illinois US District Court, which is believed to have looked into Tinubu’s suspected involvement in money laundering and drug trafficking roughly 30 years ago.
Tinubu lost $460,000 in one of the accounts connected to the former governor of Lagos State as a result of the dispute, which was settled.
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Because the 10 accounts could also be linked to Tinubu’s mother and “relatives,” according to Keyamo, Tinubu accepted responsibility for all of them.
Additionally, he said Tinubu was involved in the drug trafficking case involving two Nigerians who had previously occupied different apartments in the same building as the former governor while he was living in the US.
Keyamo added that Tinubu was not a drug cartel treasurer but rather a worker for Mobil Oil.
According to him, Tinubu made investments in the form of deposits into US bank accounts and earned returns.
According to the spokesman, Tinubu did not do a “deliberate act” by failing to deduct taxes from the investments as required by law. Instead, the banks failed to do so.
“He, Asiwaju, went to open an account, the address by which he opened the account was already used by these people…investigated for narcotics,” he said.
“The deposits he made there (in banks) are what bankers called investments; he kept the money there and he was getting interests. They (US government) said he had not paid tax on those interests. That is all and guess what? The banks are supposed to deduct the tax from source.
“Out of the 10 accounts, it was only one account – the one in Heritage Bank – that they took $460,000 as tax on interest that he benefited on the investment he made in those accounts.
“In fact, all the money in Heritage Bank was not taken; they took only $460,000 as tax,” said Keyamo, who is also the Minister of State, Labour and Employment.
Keyamo asserted that Tinubu had not been charged with a crime or found guilty, and claimed that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was responsible for the resurfacing of the contentious court document.
“His (Tinubu’s) detractors kept bringing up these issues over and over when his political profile is rising, when he wants to run for office or any political turn in his life, they will bring up these issues,” Keyamo said.
“The date on the papers flying up and down, the date of certification is 2022, so they are using this to confuse people that these are fresh papers. If documents are 40 years old or 100 years old, once you go to court, and apply for certified true copies of those documents, they will give you those documents but they will stamp the day they are giving you those documents.
“This is what our detractors, the PDP, perhaps that is what they went to the US for when they pretended that they went for high-level engagement. This is part of the high-level engagement they went for.”
