"Ibori MP", Tony Baldry
By SaharaReporters, New York
The letter, which ignited a Freedom of Information (FOI) controversy in 2010, demonstrates why Mr. Baldry did not want it in the hands of the public: while he did not make a direct case for Ibori or his associates, the letter was a disguised, intensely-sympathetic appeal to the government to intervene on their behalf.
The granting of the FOI request was made in a letter dated July 31, 2012, from Jonathan Drew, a Deputy Head of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, to author and blogger Richard Wilson.
In it, Mr. Drew said the decision to release Mr. Baldry’s letter followed an internal review of the events of 2010, and that disclosure of the letter would, in fact, enhance public understanding of the UK’s relationship with Nigeria. He also explained the decision to withhold certain portions of the letter, saying of those sections, “public interest in withholding this information is greater than the public interest in disclosing.”
Mr. Baldry’s infamous letter to the government followed a meeting with the then Nigerian President, Umaru Yar’Adua. At that time the MP for Banbury, Baldry, now Sir Baldry, the Member for North Oxfordshire, wrote it to the Secretary of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, at that time the Rt. Hon. David Milliband, MP, and it became quickly regarded in Nigeria as an effort to obstruct the trial of associates of Mr. Ibori.
The newly-released letter demonstrates a carefully-thought out attempt to sway thinking in the government in favour of the former Nigerian governor and his associates in the UK, following an intense appeal to the MP by Mr. Yar’Adua, who was Ibori’s friend and a political beneficiary. It is as yet unclear how Mr. Yar’Adua chose Baldry for his advocacy, but it seems as though the two men were brought together by Ibori himself.
“My understanding is that James Ibori faces no charges in the United Kingdom,” Mr. Baldry wrote. “However, his wife and a number of people closely associated with him have been indicted to stand trial at Southwark Crown Court on a number of counts of offences allegedly against the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.”
According to Mr. Baldry in the leter, “Arising out of those proceedings the Courts made a fairly Draconian world-wide freezing Order on all of James Ibori’s assets.”
The MP lamented how the actions of the Crown Prosecution Service had inflicted “obvious and serious consequences for James Ibori and his ability to live his life day by day…”
Quick to stress he was not holding a brief for any of the defendants, he was nonetheless armed with a good deal of information that was favourable to the former governor, and he reeled off some of the pertinent credentials, saying: “James Ibori is a public figure in Nigeria, a former Governor of Delta State, and still actively involved with the governing party of Nigeria.”
Thus establishing that “He is not hard to find,” Mr. Baldry wondered aloud into the heart and ears of the government why “notwithstanding several visits to Nigeria by the Metropolitan Police, in connection with these matters, no attempt has ever been made to invite James Ibori’s response to the allegations that have been made against him, or to give him an opportunity to put his side of the story…”
The MP then pitched: “I enclose a notarized statement, together with supporting documents, given by James Ibori, which he tells me is the first time that anyone has sought to listen to his explanation of what has occurred.”
He then turned to his meeting with Yar’Adua, and wrote about how deeply concerned the president was that Nigerians accused of corruption be prosecuted in Nigeria. He even played the sensitive colonialism card, describing Ibori’s experience with the UK as “a sort of colonialism with London trying to control what happens in Nigeria.”
By Baldry’s own account, the meeting with Yar’Adua lasted only 45 minutes. “The President’s sense of injury must, I suspect, affect the nature of UK/Nigerian bilateral relations,” he lamented in his closing arguments.
It would be recalled that while Mr. Baldry in 2009 admitted having written the letter, he refused to produce it for public examination. But what he had to say was so important to him he had also sent copies to the Attorney-General, the Rt. Hon Baroness Scotland QC; the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, the Rt. Hon Jack Straw MP; the Secretary of State for the Home Department, the Rt. Hon Alan Johnson MP; and the UK High Commissioner to Nigeria.
The challenge of unearthing the letter was taken up by Rally for Nigeria and the Nigeria Liberty Forum (NLF), which filed an FOI request with the government to try to obtain a copy of the letter.
It was on the basis of the activism of the NLF and its allegations against Mr. Baldry that Mr. Wilson originally wrote a blog about the Ibori issue in February. He was subsequently contacted by the MP’s lawyers, who claimed that his article was defamatory and threatened to sue he and his webhost for libel.
Mr. Wilson stood down the article. So had the UK Independent, which had published another story about the matter, as Mr. Baldry—fortified by Yar’Adua’s determination to keep Ibori out of embarrassment and jail—deployed threats of libel as well as obfuscation of his roles as an MP and a barrister into potent weapons of self-preservation, and profit.
For his 45 minutes with Yar’Adua, Mr. Baldry was paid royally. “Received fee of £22,012.57 from Zaiwalla & Co. (Solicitors to James Ibori), for advising clients. Time worked: 16 hours,” he registered in the MP’s Register of Interests on September 28, 2009, just four days after he fired off his infamous letter to the Foreign Secretary.
Not bad: that translates into £490.00 per minute. Or—if you are measuring by his lavish estimate of 16 hours of “professional” labour as “barrister,” not MP—nearly £1376 per hour, First Class travel and all-expenses paid Abuja welcome mat not included.
But that was in September of 2009, five months after Mr. Yar’Adua told The Guardian (Nigeria), in an exclusive interview, that some former governors (read: Ibori) being accused of corruption were simply “my friends.” It was also three months before a deeply-compromised Justice Marcel Awokulehin, at the Federal High Court, Asaba, dismissed all 170 corruption charges against Mr. Ibori, claiming the former governor had no case to answer. [The current government of Delta State, led by a cousin of Ibori’s, is, as we speak, trying to get its hands on a sum of $16million by which Ibori had tried to bribe Nuhu Ribadu, who headed the Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission at the time.]
Of greater importance, Mr. Baldry’s letter was written only two months before Mr. Yar’Adua fell fatally ill, leaving Ibori without the cover of federal power he had enjoyed since he left office two and a half years before, anchored on complicity at the highest levels.
Despite that support, the trial of Ibori’s associates continued in London courtrooms. Without that support, Ibori’s trial soon followed, shortly after he took to his heels in Nigeria but was arrested in Dubai and repatriated to the shores of England where his criminal nature was first confronted by the authorities in 1990.
Each of his associates on trial, as well as his wife, received a jail term, and without that support, Ibori himself received 13 years behind bars.
Without that support, it is little surprise that Mr. Baldry’s letter, expunged of the seedier segments that supposedly hinge on inter-state relations, has now come to light, and exposed the MP for what he really is: a man for whom the rich and corrupt mean far more than the people they have robbed or pillaged.
In January 2010, Mr. Baldry, stomping on his critics, wrote to SaharaReporters claiming we had failed to authenticate the facts we published against him, without indicating what he was referring to, or providing any evidence to enable us do better than he had suggested.
Publishing his response out of good faith, we appealed to him—in the same good faith and in the assumption that his interest in the Ibori matter was truly in the interest of law—to provide us with a copy of the letter that he had to the Foreign Office.
Predictably, he did not.
We do not know if Mr. Baldry has yet had his high-priced libel lawyers threaten the Foreign Office, but the letter through which he acquired international notoriety is now public property, and although the redactions leave him with a couple of fig leaves behind which to hide, we do not think anyone will have difficulty recognizing him for what he really is.
He will occupy the same memory cell block as one Justice Awokulehin.
READ Mr. Baldry's Letter Here
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