FBI tracked down stolen funds linked to the OBI’s campaign.

Between Peter Obi’s and Pat Utomi’s camps, there was an internal conflict in the Labour Party (LP) in August 2022 over who should be a signatory to the party’s campaign funds and have control over the party’s finances before the general election of 2023. By using the confessions of Solomon Ekunke Okpe and Johnson Uke Obogo, who were both detained in December 2022 for conspiring to conduct wire, bank, and mail fraud, the FBI has now, in February 2023, linked stolen monies from the US to Obi’s campaign.

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NewsReport gathered that when Obi took his campaign to the diaspora, many of his supporters hailed him for this move, and in the course of this, the Labour Party presidential candidate began to solicit for funds to support his ambition. What most people didn’t know was that a certain Solomon Ekunke Okpe and Johnson Uke Obogo, who were obviously Obi’s kinsmen and had a long history of involvement in a variety of cyber-enabled fraud schemes between December 2011 and January 2017, decided to wire their ill-gotten wealth to the ObiDatti campaign. As fate would have it, Okpe and Obogo got arrested and pleaded guilty in February 2023, a few weeks before the presidential election.

According to court documents, Okpe and his co-conspirators were into check fraud, romance, credit card scams, and bank fraud, or, as we say in local parlance, “yahoo yahoo” boys. Well, this does not come as a surprise, as a few weeks ago, during Obi’s town hall meeting with the students of the University of Abuja, he publicly supported cyber fraud and said that the Yahoo boys were doing a legitimate hustle. The EFCC and police should stop arresting them.

Perhaps Obi could not speak out against cyber fraud because he was getting a huge chunk of his campaign donations from fraudsters in the diaspora. Although some of the donors to the ObiDatti fundraiser are originally Nigerian, they have a dual citizenship that recognizes them as US nationals. Hence, it becomes a crime under what is applicable under the U.S. laws for citizens to fundraise for foreign PEPs. especially as it concerns election interference in another country (Nigeria).