to gauge. Because money launderers are seeking primarily to turn dirty cash into other assets as quickly as possible rather than to turn a profit or invest prudently, they are happy to pay more than a fair price for goods and services. That distorts everything, from banking to real estate. It furthers the accumulation of a country’s prime economic assets in the hands of the minority, just as Sonangol, the Angolan state-owned oil company that is the engine of the Futungo’s looting machine, has expanded into property, finance and aviation. Then there is the dirty money that is simply parked in bank accounts or basements rather than stimulating the economy by circulating. When I asked Rewane how much money he thought was trapped, he laughed. ‘That’s the million-dollar question.’ I asked him what the consequence of all this skulduggery was for the Nigerian economy as a whole. ‘When you have an imperfect economy where all money is dirty money, you will just have a completely dysfunctional economic arrangement.’
Where legitimate business cannot thrive, crime flourishes. Mafias from New York to Naples work by creating scarcity and controlling supply. Northern Nigeria’s Mafiosi are no different. Dahiru Mangal might not have been responsible for the collapse of the electricity network and the crumbling roads that crippled the Nigerian textile industry – Dutch Disease and oil-fuelled corruption took care of that. Neither is he the sole corrupter of the Nigerian customs service – Shell has admitted paying bungs worth $2 million between 2004 and 2006 to Nigerian customs officials to smooth the importation of materials for Bonga, its giant offshore oilfield, part of a wider scheme in which the Swiss group Panalpina showered bribes on Nigerian officials, some on behalf of Shell, booking them as ‘evacuations’, ‘special handling’, and ‘prereleases’.23
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