Nigerian Airline CEO Faces New US Charge In $20M Fraud Case

US authorities charged the owner of Nigeria’s largest airline with obstruction of justice in a $20 million fraud case.

The charge updates an indictment from five years ago in which he and an alleged accomplice were charged with bank fraud and money laundering.

The US Department of Justice said Allen Onyema, founder and chief executive of Air Peace, faces the new charge of obstruction “for submitting false documents” to the US government. Onyema, 61, allegedly submitted the documents in a bid to end the investigation that led to the bank fraud and money laundering charges, the DOJ announced on Friday.

Onyema is charged alongside Air Peace’s finance chief, Ejiroghene Eghagha. The DOJ, in its 2019 bank fraud and money laundering indictment, alleged that both officials moved “more than $20 million” from Nigeria through US bank accounts in a scheme involving false documents based on the purchase of airplanes from a company allegedly based in the US state of Georgia.

The obstruction charges against the pair are for “additional crimes of fraud,” Ryan K. Buchanan, the US Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said last week.

Air Peace, in a statement on Sunday, said both executives, who have not been arrested since the first indictment, “remain innocent and these are mere allegations.” The company said Onyema has “consistently cooperated” with the investigation process and is confident both executives will be “exonerated.”

Air Peace operates the largest volume of daily domestic flights in Nigeria. Onyema founded the airline in 2013. The company flies to and from Nigeria and some West African capital cities. It began direct flights between London’s Gatwick airport and Lagos in March. A previously active route between Lagos and Dubai has yet to resume following a two-year hiatus over visa-related disagreements between Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates.

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The DOJ formulated indictments against Onyema based on the businessman’s alleged activities dating back to 2010, the year he is said to have started frequent visits to Atlanta. He is said to have opened “several personal and business bank accounts” that received over $44.9 million between 2010 and 2018.

The original bank fraud and money laundering charges related to how Onyema allegedly used his accounts from 2016.

By presenting letters of credit supposedly needed to fund the purchase of five Boeing 737 passenger planes for Air Peace, Onyema and Eghagha allegedly caused banks to transfer more than $20 million into the CEO’s Atlanta-based bank accounts.

But a variety of documents used to support those letters of credit — including appraisals to prove that Air Peace was buying the planes from a Georgia-based business called Springfield Aviation Company — were fake, the DOJ claims.

Onyema owned Springfield Aviation, the company owned no aircraft, and the appraisals came from a company that did not exist, the DOJ said. He then “allegedly laundered over $16 million of the proceeds of the fraud by transferring it to other accounts,” according to the 2019 indictment.

The updated indictment this October comes from actions the DOJ says Onyema and Eghagha took after learning of the investigation leading up to the bank fraud indictment in November 2019.

In October of that year, the CEO directed his lawyers to present a Springfield Aviation contract backdated to 2016 to the US government, in a bid to unfreeze his accounts and “derail the investigation.” The document had actually been drawn-up in May 2019 by a Springfield manager and left undated, on the orders of the two accused Air Peace executives, the DOJ said.