First Person: Enrico Monfrini

Enrico Monfrini has so far tracked down $1.3bn looted from Nigeria – and is looking for more

I specialise in tracing money that has been embezzled or received through corrupt deals by heads of state, their entourages and ministers or other publicly exposed persons. I’ve heard that some people call me “the dictator hunter”.

I began this work in 1999, when the Nigerian government asked me to pursue the wealth taken from the country by its former dictator, General Sani Abacha, who had died the previous year. I am a lawyer based in Geneva but I have been close to Africans all my life; my father was a diplomat in Gabon, and then in Ivory Coast. I wanted to be a farmer and grow crops, but my father said, “No way.” So I became a lawyer, and eventually it happened that I represented several people who opposed Abacha during his reign. When they took power and wanted someone they could trust to pursue the money, they asked me.

I began with very few details, and only found empty bank accounts, until I lodged a criminal complaint. The authorities in Geneva decided to uphold my request and freeze – overnight – accounts belonging to the Abachas. The money involved amounted to about $650m. That was the beginning. From there, the work consisted of stripping the accounts, understanding where the money was coming from and where it went. A launderer will systematically split a large sum into irregular amounts – $7.23m say – and send these to other banks, before regathering everything in final places. You need to be able to act both as a lawyer and an accountant.

We worked day and night, for months, and even now I am still working every day on this case, as well as others. It is one thing to find and freeze the money, but the next step is to confiscate the funds and repatriate them. This is the hardest part. Nobody disputes the cause, but some countries refuse to help, or do not have laws that allow it. To give you a practical example, more than $400m connected with the Abacha case has been sleeping in the Channel Islands for years, because Jersey is unable – through a lack of laws – to confiscate the money by itself.

However, so far I have restituted – or helped to restitute – $1.3bn to the Central Bank of Nigeria. There is another $1bn to go. It is frozen – some of it is in Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and the Bahamas, and some is in France and Jersey.

Most of the restitution has been monitored by the World Bank, to make sure the money goes to national funds and not into people’s pockets. I am also working on behalf of Brazil and Haiti, and others I cannot talk about.

Threats have been made to me, but always indirectly. I might get a phone call or a visit from a lawyer from Paris or London, who would say: “Oh, well, you know, Enrico, you should be more careful, because that person didn’t at all like what you did to him. He is known to be a rather violent person, with contacts ...” But if you are afraid, you can’t do this job. You also need to have a network of friends, which I have built up through the Abacha case. I’m talking of journalists, politicians, policemen, prosecutors and bankers. I am 66 years old now, but I travel constantly. If you want to get sexy information, you can only get it from people you trust, and who trust you.

I know lawyers who launder money and they make more than I do. I meet a lot of strange and crooked people, but I also meet a lot of straightforward and important people who want the world to change. The Abacha case opened up a road that will become a motorway. Give the world another 10 years and you will see the end of all these old thieves, the uneducated dictators with no idea of the poverty in which their people live. Those countries where you can still hide money will realise that it is in their best interests not to give safe haven to corrupt funds.

We are seeing many dictators fall now, but it is becoming harder for them to steal fortunes – because people like me will hunt them down.