Kogi-born oil baron, Bashorun Jide Omokore, a shady businessman linked to Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan, early in the week suffered a heart attack shortly after a meeting with Mr. Jonathan.
Family sources said yesterday Mr. Omokore has been stabilized and is recuperating at home in Abuja.
Omokore is at the center of a variety of financial deals involving the President and the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke.
Some of the deals involve a revelation by the ousted governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, that some businessmen took $6 billion from the proceeds of crude oil sales and shared it amongst themselves.
Omokore is also at the center of a scam in which the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company (NPDC) Ltd, a fully-owned subsidiary of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), was used as a conduit by Omokore’s Atlantic Energy.
In 2011, Mrs. Alison-Madueke caused the NNPC to sign strategic partnership agreements through NPDC to engage in managing OML 4, 38, 41, and 30, 34, which had been sold by Shell to the NPDC.
Omokore’s firm was supposed to get 30% of the profit from the deal but NPDC officials told SaharaReporters that all the sale proceeds were taken by Omokore on behalf of President Jonathan and Alison-Madueke.
Mr. Omokore is also heavily involved in the kerosene subsidy scam which runs in the billions of Naira.
Sources tell SaharaReporters that he is also in possession of at least two private jets he is believed to be holding in trust for Mr. Jonathan and the oil minister. In 2012, the French police briefly detained a private jet conveying Mr. Omokore from Paris to Monaco.
