NIGERIAN POLITICIANS LINK TO MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR United States PROPERTY IN FRESH INVESTIGATION
Uzor Kalu, Sambo Dasuki, others named
Uncovered
How Nigerian leaders spent millions on SC real estate amid US retreat from dirty money fight
By Tony Bartelme and Christian Boschult The Post and Courier and John Dell’Osso Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa
Sambo Dasuki, the son of a Nigerian sultan, has long been among the nation’s most powerful government leaders.
In 2002, he and his wife purchased Green Hill Farms, about six miles from Aiken, South Carolina’s horse district.
Andrew Whitaker/Staff
Prominent Nigerian politicians accused of raiding government coffers in their country have family and corporate links to properties worth millions of dollars in the Carolinas, including a tract in Spartanburg with a $118,282 bill for back taxes and fees, according to records obtained by The Post and Courier’s Uncovered project and an international consortium of journalists.
The findings highlight how powerful people from across the world, including some with checkered pasts, sink money into unexpected corners of the United States, including South Carolina. They also come at a pivotal time in the United States’ long fight to inject more transparency into American real estate purchases by foreign investors, experts say.
Congress in 2021 enacted the Corporate Transparency Act, a bipartisan law to deter money laundering, terrorism financing and tax evasion. New rules stemming from the law were set to go into effect this year, including requirements that real estate professionals identify the true buyers of properties.
On March 2, the Trump administration said it wouldn’t enforce the law.
Notable Nigerian public officials who bought land in the Carolinas include Orji Uzor Kalu, a former governor of the oil rich state of Abia and a current Nigerian senator, according to records obtained by The Post and Courier and the Paris-based Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa.
Kalu owns or has corporate and family connections to five properties in South Carolina worth at least $2 million on tax rolls and properties worth more than $4.7 million in the Charlotte metro area, records show. He also owns two properties in a bucolic area outside Washington, D.C., including one home with eight bathrooms and a tennis court. It’s listed on real estate sites for $2.5 million.
A Nigerian court granted bail to former state governors Kalu and Saminu Turaki charged with corruption. Kalu was convicted in 2019, but 5 months later, a higher court set the conviction aside. It’s unclear what the status of his charges are.
Kalu, 64, hasn’t been accused of any criminal wrongdoing in connection with his American real estate purchases, and his business background suggests he has plenty of money to invest.
In 2013, Kalu told a Nigerian radio interviewer that he made “millions before joining politics” trading fish and palm oil. His company, SLOK Holding, is well-known in Nigeria for its aviation, petroleum and maritime ventures. He’s also been chairman of two of the nation’s largest newspapers. In 2015, Forbes magazine included Kalu in its Africa’s “50 Richest” feature, estimating his fortune then at $330 million. Over the years, he received numerous civic awards. His social media accounts are filled with posts showing him at work in the Nigerian legislature.
But Kalu also has been accused of using his government position for personal gain. Nigerian prosecutors in 2007 alleged that while serving as a regional governor, he diverted millions of dollars in government money into his company, Slok Nigeria Ltd.
Corruption trials in Nigeria can last for more than a decade, which is what happened with Kalu. In 2019, he was convicted on fraud charges and sentenced to 12 years in prison. But after five months, a higher judge overturned the conviction and set Kalu free. Prosecutors pledged to retry the case but a higher court turned back their request last year. It’s unclear where the case stands today. A spokesperson for the prosecutors did not respond to messages seeking comments.
The Post and Courier sought comments from Kalu, contacting him through phone, messaging and social media accounts, as well as through his media assistant in Nigeria. Neither Kalu nor his media assistant responded.
In addition to Kalu, another prominent Nigerian government and business leader, Sambo Dasuki, paid nearly $1 million to buy a horse farm in Aiken in 2002, The Post and Courier and its journalism partners revealed in its recent Uncovered report “Power and Polo.” At the time of the sale, Dasuki oversaw Nigeria’s government mint.
Money for the Aiken horse farm flowed through corporate accounts around the world to a South Carolina real estate company, U.S. Homeland Security records show. After Dasuki bought the farm, he immediately transferred the property to his wife for $1. His wife used the horse farm to apply for an American residency visa, records show. But U.S. immigration officials nixed the request, citing a lack of evidence that the Dasukis bought the farm with a lawful source of funds, records show.
Dasuki later went on to become Nigeria’s national security advisor, the president’s top military aide. But in 2015, corruption prosecutors in Nigeria charged him with diverting as much as $2 billion from Nigerian government accounts. Bank records obtained by the journalism partnership showed Dasuki’s office sending $27 million to a Nigerian furniture maker who subsequently bought mansions in Los Angeles and the Washington area. As with Kalu’s prosecution, Dasuki’s has been a legal marathon. Dasuki’s trial began in 2016 and is ongoing. Dasuki has denied the allegations against him.
The journalism partnership submitted questions about the Aiken farm purchase to Dasuki’s lawyer in Nigeria, who did not respond. Yushau A. Shuaib, a public relations consultant who is close to Dasuki, recently wrote on a marketing platform in Nigeria that “Power and Polo” was “a blatant attempt to rewrite history,” and that Dasuki’s family has a long history of successful business ventures and international diplomacy.
Site in Spartanburg owned by prominent Nigerian politician
Making corruption easier
Anti-corruption experts said the Carolinas are ripe for questionable foreign real estate investments.
In the past, prosecutors often targeted higher profile money laundering destinations, such as Miami, Los Angeles and New York.
“But we are seeing more money going into non-traditional jurisdictions — farmland in Iowa, factories in Kentucky,” said Gary Kalman, executive director of Transparency International U.S., a nonprofit anti-corruption group.
And lax American rules make it easy to set up corporate shells that hide true owners of properties, Kalman said. He cited a novel experiment in 2014, where American and Australian researchers posed as would-be terrorists and crooks.
They fired off 7,400 emails to companies around the world that set up corporations. The emails were filled with language suggesting nefarious intentions. But nearly half of these service companies failed to ask for proof of identity, the researchers detailed in their book “Global Shell Games.”
Researchers found that it often took just a few hundred dollars to set up a virtually untraceable legal entity capable of funneling vast amounts of dirty cash.
Nigerian official’s interest in SC
Orji Uzor Kalu’s real estate investments in South Carolina stretch back decades. In the early 1990s, he was a member of Nigeria’s House of Representatives. At about the same time, in 1993, he bought a 4-acre tract in the Saxon area of Spartanburg County.
The land today is a portrait of neglect. It’s a mostly empty lot of red clay dirt surrounded by trees and shrubs and a single residential trash can. Neighbors said the land once had several warehouses and two homes. The front warehouse has since burned down, but one still stands.
In a recent interview at the warehouse off Farley Avenue, a man who identified himself as Nnanna Utah told The Post and Courier that he went to school with Kalu in Nigeria in the 1980s. Utah said that he’s rented and used the warehouse since the early 2000s.
“He can buy anything anywhere in the world he wants to,” Utah said. “He likes South Carolina because he was doing business here even before he made a dime. He’s familiar with South Carolina. He likes South Carolina.”
Utah said he’s not familiar with Kalu’s many businesses. “All he knows is somebody like me stays there in his warehouse and takes care of it.”
Phil Terry, the retired owner of Freedom Auto Junkyard, which is next to the lot, said he and a business partner, Ned Blackwell, bought Kalu’s property in 2016 at an auction for landowners who hadn’t paid their taxes.
They covered $12,342 in back taxes to acquire it. But tax auctions have a 1-year grace period. If original owners pay the back taxes and interest, properties revert back to them. Terry said he began cleaning up the land, but just before the end of that 1-year period, a broker paid off the taxes and the property went back to Kalu. The Post and Courier confirmed Terry’s account of what happened.
Taxes are once again outstanding. After missing two deadlines this year and incurring penalties, Kalu now owes Spartanburg County $118,282.52, including fees for the county’s demolition of the warehouse, tax records show.
His tax bill was sent to an address in Fort Mill bought in 2005 by Eunice Uzor. Kalu’s mother is Eunice Uzor Kalu. Mascot Uzor also is listed on the title. Mascot Uzor Kalu is his brother and also a prominent Nigerian public figure. Mascot has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
Records show that Orji Uzor Kalu bought and sold other properties in the Carolinas through SLOK LLC and other American corporations. Some of these properties have been the subject of lawsuits over unpaid homeowners’ association fees, court records show. He bought at least nine properties in South and North Carolina and Maryland in the 18 months after Nigerian prosecutors announced their corruption charges.
Family members were involved in many of the transactions. For instance, in 2006, Kalu appointed Mascot as his legal representative in connection with the purchase of another home in Fort Mill, records show.
Other properties owned by Orji Uzor Kalu or immediate family include 67 acres in Chester and York counties bought in 2007, near the Charlotte metro area. A look by a Post and Courier reporter showed that it was undeveloped and strewn with trash. Neighbors said they didn’t know anything about the owner. In Fort Mill, the stately brick home bought by Eunice Uzor in 2005, is for sale. A reporter noted containers in the driveway and stacked boxes on the other side of a window.
All told, records show that Kalu and family members and associated corporations bought and sold more than 40 properties in the Carolinas, Texas and Maryland.
A home in Indian Land, near Fort Mill, was bought by family members of Orji Uzor Kalu of Nigeria. A delinquent tax bill on one of Kalu’s properties in Spartanburg was sent to this address.
Zachary Bell/Staff
Anti-corruption rules under fire
In the past, the U.S. Treasury Department issued “Geographic Targeting Orders” for areas that had long been money-laundering magnets, including Florida and California.
These rules required real estate professionals and lawyers in those places to provide more information about the true buyers and sellers of residential properties, particularly when transactions were done with cash.
But no county in the Carolinas was covered under those transparency rules.
Last year, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network said it would do away with the targeted orders and require nationwide reporting of cash real estate transactions.
The push for tighter rules originated in the bipartisan passage of the Corporate Transparency Act, a federal law to deter crooks from using shell companies to hide dirty money. The law noted that nearly 2 million corporations are set up in the United States every year, often with little information identifying the people behind them.
It was among the U.S. government’s most ambitious moves to combat money laundering through American real estate and the culmination of more than a decade of congressional hearings and debates.
But the law faces new headwinds.
In December, a federal judge in Texas effectively put the law’s enforcement on hold with a nationwide preliminary injunction.
Three weeks later, an appellate court lifted the injunction, citing the “public’s urgent interest in combating financial crime and protecting our country’s national security.”
Then, in a case of judicial whiplash, the same appellate court reversed its own decision. And in January, the U.S. Supreme Court added even more uncertainty. The court allowed the U.S. government to enforce the Corporate Transparency Act. But it also ruled that, for the time being, real estate companies didn’t have to report stricter details about a property’s true owner.
On March 2, the Trump administration announced on social media that it wouldn’t enforce the transparency law.
“Today’s action is part of President (Donald) Trump’s bold agenda to unleash American prosperity by reining in burdensome regulations, in particular for small businesses that are the backbone of the American economy,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a South Carolina native, posted.
Meanwhile, in early February, Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi quietly disbanded the federal “Klepto Capture” task force, a program that targeted assets of Russian oligarchs. And Trump recently floated an idea of selling $5 million “gold cards” to wealthy people interested in faster paths to U.S. citizenship.
Anti-corruption groups are pushing back, arguing that the United States already has lax rules to keep out foreign tax dodgers and rulers who steal their country’s resources.
Former F.B.I. agent Debra LaPrevotte helped set up the agency’s Kleptocracy program, which seized more than $1 billion from corrupt foreign officials. One investigation targeted the seizure of hundreds of millions of assets stolen by former Nigerian strongman Sani Abacha in the 1990s.
She said efforts to weaken anti-corruption laws have far-reaching impacts in the United States and abroad. In the U.S., large influxes of dirty money distort American real estate markets, hiking real estate prices for everyone. It facilitates corruption in low-income countries, often leading to more political oppression and violence.
“We’re supposed to lift people up to our level, not go down to theirs,” she said.
Kalman of Transparency International U.S. said the impacts directly and indirectly affect millions of Americans.
“There are almost unlimited examples of drug cartels using anonymous companies to launder money in the United States,” he said. “So if you’re concerned about the fentanyl or opioid crisis hitting families around the country, targeting the money instead of the product is one way to turn the corner.”
The proliferation of shell corporations also facilitates the creation of consumer scams because they can shut down a corporation when they get caught and open another in minutes.
The United States, he said, “is one of the easiest places to hide money in the world.”
Zachary Bell of The Post and Courier contributed to this report.
What a horse farm in Aiken, South Carolina tells us about alleged global money laundering.
What a horse farm in Aiken, South Carolina tells us about alleged global money laundering.
About this project
This story and the previously published “Polo and Power” are part of a series that asks: Who is your neighbor? Politicians from countries where corruption is endemic regularly park their money overseas in reasonably secure assets, like real estate. Research shows that the United States does little to prevent these outside actors.
For this story, Post and Courier reporters Tony Bartelme, Christian Boschult and Zachary Bell worked with John Dell’Osso, director of investigations for Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAFF) to analyze property and court records. The Paris-based nonprofit supports individuals who leak information that is in the public interest of African citizens and also develops journalistic collaborations based on whistleblower revelations. Other partners in the series include: Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, The Aiken Standard and the Houston Chronicle. A separate project organized by PPLAFF and the Washington Post recently explored Sambo Dasuki’s ties to properties in Maryland.
Culled from Post and Courier