Man caused collapse of entire bank after selling it an imaginary airport for $242,000,000
Emmanuel Nwude caused an entire bank to collapse
A man caused the collapse of an entire bank after selling his employer an imaginary airport for a whopping $242,000,000.
Emmanuel Nwude used to work as a director at the Union Bank of Nigeria – meaning he had a pretty good idea of how the financial industry worked, and he certainly used that to his advantage.
One day, Emmanuel decided to make a phone call to Nelson Sakaguchi, a director for the Brazilian bank Banco Noroeste.
However, the fellow bank director claimed to be someone else, someone pretty big in fact – Paul Ogwuma, the then-governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria.
Emmanuel claimed he was building a new airport and needed some money to do it.
Sakaguchi was likely looking at it from a business point of view, as he would make $10 million on commission if Emmanuel got the funding he was asking for.
With no real background checks done, the banker agreed to the deal, and so Emmanuel was paid a total of $242 million between 1995 and 1998 to build the airport that no one even checked existed.
It wasn’t unitl 1997, when Banco Noroeste was set to be bought out by baking giant Santander, that people noticed the numbers just weren’t adding up.
The company had half their money sitting in the Cayman Islands to start with, while they were also funding a man who was building an imaginary airport.
At this point, the bank was heading to a point of no return, and they ceased to exist in 2001.
Once the bank realized they were being scammed by Emmanuel, criminal investigations were launched on how he defrauded a bank out of $242 million.
The sale involving Santander did go through, but it came as a huge cost to Banco Noroeste – something they were never able to recover from.
Three years after the bank went bankrupt, Emmanuel and his accomplices ended up in court, only for the 2004 case to be thrown out, and all of them to be arrested again so they could face charges in another court.
The group eventually pleaded guilty to over 100 counts of fraud and bribery, despite a last-minute bribery attempt by Emanuel.
He tried to pay a $75,000 bribe to get out of trouble after one of his accomplices confessed, but the bribe just got him into deeper trouble.
Emmanuel was sentenced to 25 years behind bars for defrauding the bank, but was granted an early release in 2006.
