Nigerian politically exposed persons (PEPs) are using stolen money to fund their children’s and wards’ expensive tuitions in the United Kingdom.

United Kingdom universities are turning a blind eye to these Nigerian political elites laundering dirty money through their fees, according to a paper published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from West Africa expert and non-resident scholar, Matthew Page.

The findings followed a project commissioned by the British High Commissioner to Nigeria, Catriona Laing, and tagged West African Elites’ Spending on UK Schools and Universities: A closer Look. The research exposed  the “unexplained wealth” used by Nigerian politicians and public officials to pay British university and boarding school fees.

UK schools are considered by global standard to be very expensive yet many Nigerian public office holders, past and present, have their children in UK universities, with Nigeria said to be contributing more than 50 percent of UK universities tuition in West Africa.

The same is true of universities in Canada, United States and parts of Europe where Nigerian parents prefer to send their children to. Egypt, Saudi Arabi, Syria and Yemen are also other preferred choices usually by parents of northern extraction on account of religious affinity.

Public universities in Nigeria are a shadow of their old selves and some privileged public office parents rather than choose any of the private universities in the country overlook them for overseas universities.

According to the report, the amounts spent in UK schools and others are way above the salary levels of these prominent Nigerians, categorised as ‘politically exposed persons’ or ‘PEPs’ in anti-money laundering system jargon.

Such people are supposed to be subjected to special checks by banks and other financial institutions, although anti-money laundering legislation usually does not insist that such assessments are undertaken by educational bodies.

Page in the report noted that there is plenty of evidence for universities to question if they voluntarily decided to check how some Nigerian students’ fees are being paid. The fees “dwarf” official salaries, the report notes, pointing out that a Nigerian cabinet minister takes home roughly £16,000 (US$22,200).

“Across the board there’s absolutely no way that Nigerian public officials can legitimately afford … the fees, so questions need to be asked,” Page told University World News in an exclusive interview.

“There are red flags,” Page underlined, pointing not only to the salary gap but also third parties commonly paying for fees, a potential indicator of bribery.

Page complained that university admissions staff are too focused on ability to pay and not the source of funding and are unlikely to question the discrepancy.

Just 24 out of 478,437 suspicious activity reports filed to Britain’s National Crime Agency in the 2018-19 fiscal year came from the UK education sector.

The report estimates that the value of questionable unexplained payments to UK universities and boarding schools from West Africa (also including Ghana) exceeds £30 million (US$42 million) annually, most of it from Nigeria.

Page said that universities “try and maintain plausible deniability”, arguing that they are not banks and have a responsibility to educate students.

But the paper says that while universities are not covered by the UK’s anti-money laundering regulations, they have “basic anti-money laundering responsibilities under the 2002 Proceeds of Crime Act” to report valid concerns about potentially receiving dirty money.

Page said: “No solution is perfect…”, but added that universities needed to be “reducing risks”.

“It’s about going from having no filter to having some awareness,” he said.

He proposed that universities in the UK should be added to a list of professional bodies subject to oversight by the Financial Conduct Authority’s Office for Professional Body Anti-Money Laundering Supervision, and henceforth tasked with offering guidance on best practice with anti-money laundering screening in higher education.

In Nigeria, Auwal Ibrahim Musa, executive director of the Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre and head of Transparency International (Nigeria), told University World News that the report was “actually confirming what Transparency International (Nigeria) and many civil society groups in Nigeria have been talking about regarding public official corruption and diversion of public taxpayers’ funds for personal use”.

He argued that there “has not been any effort from Nigerians who claim to be fighting corruption to block leakages, to ensure that public officials are not using public funds for personal gains”.

Page said the problem was far from restricted to Nigeria-UK student flows. “Educational institutions in Canada, the United States and other countries that recruit elite students from West Africa are exposing themselves to the same corruption risks as their British counterparts,” said the report, particularly Canada which has lower tuition fees and a new Nigeria Student Express visa scheme.

 Additional report from University World News