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Paper long abstract:

The paper provides an explanation of the 'conveyor belt' that allows Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) to rehabilitate their money in the West, while inserting Nigerian material in contemporary debates. The research questions tackled are: 1) Why is the regulatory system in the West still not efficient enough to stop enabling practices? 2) How does this bridge between the three steps occur? 3) What is it that makes these 'fixers' acceptable to blue chip companies? To answer these complex questions, we build on incipient and developing literature on enablers and flip the angle of analysis from the service providers to the PEPs themselves, in order to appreciate the loopholes that an often-adopted institutionalist perspective, on its own, might not be able to catch. To these ends, the article traces the trajectory of established money laundering practices by focusing on three in-depth case studies of Nigerian PEPs and their enablers: James Ibori, Dan Etete and Alison Diezani-Madueke. Data collection has been carried out through the close reading of close to one hundred documents, including court proceedings, interview transcripts and land registry records, and complemented by semi-structured interviews with investigators and experts. We use an interpretive practice tracing methodology elucidate and test the steps leading to money-laundering. Our findings show that the ‘rogue operators’ explanation is insufficient: once the groundwork of the ‘boutique’ actors legitimises the PEP’s actions, larger firms willingly take on board the business. Furthermore, we show that the problem is wider than the ‘conventional’ enablers: we pinpoint professional figures who are not conventionally treated as enablers, but who are nevertheless instrumental in the accumulation of illegal gain and money laundering (e.g.: commodity traders).