Mr. Chagoury, Your Lawyer Is Waiting. So Am I.
By Kio Amachree | Stockholm, Sweden | President, Worldview International
Gilbert Chagoury, a political operative published an article in The Punch on April 16, 2026, urging you to sue me for defamation.
I am writing to tell you directly: please do.
I am not hiding in Stockholm. I am not anonymous. My name is Kio Amachree. My father was Chief Godfrey Kio Jaja Amachree QC — Nigeria’s first indigenous Solicitor-General, first Permanent Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Justice, first African Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations. He built the legal infrastructure of the country you have profited from for six decades. I am his eldest son. I know what courts are for. I know what discovery means. And I know precisely what happens when a man with your legal history walks into one voluntarily.
So let me be precise. Every charge. Every count. On the record.
COUNT ONE: The Swiss Conviction for Money Laundering
In the year 2000, a court in Geneva, Switzerland, convicted Gilbert Chagoury of money laundering and aiding a criminal organisation. The funds in question were stolen from the Nigerian treasury by military dictator Sani Abacha, whose regime looted an estimated $2 billion to $5 billion from the Nigerian people during his years in power from 1993 to 1998.
The court found that Chagoury helped establish accounts at SG Ruegg Bank in Geneva through which more than $120 million was transferred from the Central Bank of Nigeria on behalf of the Abacha family. He was fined one million Swiss francs. He was ordered to return $66 million to the Nigerian government. He later secured immunity from Nigerian prosecution by returning an estimated $300 million held in Swiss accounts — a figure that itself tells you the scale of what passed through his hands.
This is not an allegation. This is a verdict. It is in the Geneva court record. It has never been overturned. It has never been appealed successfully. It stands.
While that money was moving through Swiss banks, Nigerian children were dying in hospitals without medicine. Nigerian roads were collapsing. Nigerian teachers were going unpaid. The treasury that should have built this nation was being emptied — and Gilbert Chagoury was the man holding the pipe.
COUNT TWO: The United States Visa Denial on Terrorism-Related Grounds
The United States government denied Gilbert Chagoury a visa in 2015. The denial was based on intelligence findings that he had provided financial support to Michel Aoun, a Lebanese political figure whose party, the Free Patriotic Movement, operates in political coalition with Hezbollah — an organisation designated as a terrorist group by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and numerous other governments.
An FBI intelligence report, cited in U.S. government proceedings, stated that Chagoury had sent funds to Aoun, who in turn directed money to Hezbollah. The report described Aoun as facilitating fundraising for Hezbollah. The intelligence was described as unverified from a source — but it was sufficient for the United States government to bar one of the world’s wealthiest men from entering American territory.
Chagoury disputed the findings. He sued. He lost. The visa denial stood.
This is not gossip. This is the record of a proceeding he initiated himself — in which he named as defendants the FBI, the Department of Justice, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of State, and the National Counterterrorism Center. He put every American security agency on the stand to clear his name. None of them capitulated. The records remain open.
Nigeria’s current president counts this man as his closest personal confidante. His son sits on this man’s company board. Nigeria has given this man its second-highest national honour. And the United States government will not let him through its airports.
COUNT THREE: The Federal Election Law Conspiracy and Deferred Prosecution Agreement
In 2018, Gilbert Chagoury and two associates resolved a federal investigation in the United States into a conspiracy to violate federal election laws. The investigation found that he had schemed to make illegal foreign political contributions to United States presidential and congressional candidates across multiple election cycles — contributions routed through American citizens acting as straw donors to disguise their foreign origin.
One of the political figures implicated in the downstream consequences of this scheme was Nebraska Congressman Jeff Fortenberry, who was subsequently convicted of lying to federal investigators about the illegal contributions and resigned from Congress on March 31, 2022.
In 2021, Chagoury entered a civil forfeiture settlement of $1.8 million with United States authorities. He later entered a deferred prosecution agreement with the United States Department of Justice. He has maintained he committed no wrongdoing — which is precisely what deferred prosecution agreements are designed to accommodate while preserving the full prosecutorial record.
That record exists. In a lawsuit, it becomes an exhibit.
COUNT FOUR: The Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway — $13 Billion Without a Single Competitive Bid
In 2024, the administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu awarded the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway contract to Hitech Construction Company Limited — a subsidiary of the Chagoury Group — at an estimated cost of between $11 billion and $13 billion. This is, by most calculations, the single most expensive infrastructure contract in Nigerian history.
It was awarded without a public competitive tender. Without advertisement in the federal procurement gazette. Without the process mandated by the Nigerian Public Procurement Act. The Federal Ministry of Works has not produced documentation of a compliant tender process because no such process occurred.
The contract is currently the subject of active litigation in the Federal High Court, brought by a plaintiff invoking the Freedom of Information Act to compel disclosure of procurement documents. The Federal Government has hired no fewer than six Senior Advocates of Nigeria and seventeen other lawyers to resist that disclosure.
When a government fights this hard to keep procurement documents secret, the documents are not innocent.
At the time of this award, President Tinubu’s son, Seyi Tinubu, was a serving board member of CDK Integrated Industries — a Chagoury Group subsidiary. Documents reviewed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project revealed that Seyi Tinubu was also a majority shareholder in an offshore company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands alongside Ronald Chagoury Jr., Gilbert Chagoury’s son. The BVI is a jurisdiction chosen specifically for its corporate opacity.
The President of Nigeria awarded a $13 billion no-bid contract to the business empire of a man whose son co-owned an offshore company with the President’s son. Segun Showunmi calls this “infrastructure.” I call it what a Geneva court would recognise.
COUNT FIVE: The Snake Island Port — $1 Billion, 45 Years, No Tender
In March 2026, a second major contract was awarded to Chagoury Group interests — a 45-year concession for the Snake Island container terminal in Lagos, valued at $1 billion, in partnership with MSC Group, the Geneva-based container shipping giant. ITB Nigeria, the Chagoury subsidiary involved, was awarded this concession without a public competitive process.
The companies involved in this transaction carry a documented history of bribery penalties, money laundering convictions, and criminal investigations across multiple European jurisdictions. The Foundation for Investigative Journalism in Nigeria published a detailed account of these legal histories. The Nigerian public has received no explanation of why these companies were selected, on what terms, and under whose authority.
Two major port concessions. One coastal highway. All awarded to the same family. All without public tender. All during the presidency of a man who has described Gilbert Chagoury as someone with whom he can “sleep with a still mind.”
That is not infrastructure policy. That is a private estate.
COUNT SIX: The Citizenship That Abacha Gave Him
My critics insist I have no right to examine Gilbert Chagoury’s Nigerian citizenship. They are wrong — legally, constitutionally, and historically.
Gilbert Chagoury was born in Lagos in 1946 to Lebanese immigrant parents. His parents were not Nigerian citizens. They were Lebanese nationals who had migrated to colonial Nigeria. He was educated not in Nigeria but at the Collège des Frères Chrétiens in Lebanon. His ancestral village is Miziara in northern Lebanon — where a boulevard bears his name, where the town square is named after his father, and where, by the admission of its own deputy mayor, the entire local economy depends on money earned in Nigeria.
It is publicly documented and credibly reported that Gilbert Chagoury received Nigerian citizenship during the military dictatorship of Sani Abacha — the very regime he served as personal economic adviser, and whose stolen funds he was convicted in Switzerland of laundering. The grant of citizenship was not the product of a transparent constitutional process. It was the product of a relationship — between a military dictator who operated entirely outside the law and a businessman who made himself indispensable to that dictator’s financial machinery.
A citizenship conferred by a criminal regime, as a reward for services rendered to a looting enterprise, is not a citizenship that places itself beyond scrutiny. It is precisely the kind of citizenship that demands it.
COUNT SEVEN: The Passports He Holds But Does Not Disclose
Gilbert Chagoury is not simply Nigerian. He is a man of multiple nationalities and multiple passports — a fact his defenders in the Nigerian press conspicuously omit.
He holds Lebanese citizenship. He holds British citizenship — he identified himself as a British citizen in his own legal filings before the United States District Court for the District of Columbia when he sued the FBI and the Department of Justice. He holds Saint Lucian citizenship, in whose name he has served as Ambassador to the Holy See and Permanent Delegate to UNESCO in Paris since 1995 — funding that diplomatic mission entirely at his own personal expense, an arrangement that raises the question of what a private billionaire actually purchases when he acquires the diplomatic passport of a small Caribbean island nation.
There are credible grounds to believe he holds or has held French residency or citizenship. He has maintained a sustained presence in Paris across decades. He has made major philanthropic contributions to French institutions — the Louvre named a gallery for him and his wife. These are not the habits of a visitor. These are the habits of a man who has ensured that wherever the legal weather turns, he has an exit.
When the weather turns in Nigeria — when a new government arrives, when the court orders are enforced, when the FBI files are finally unsealed — Gilbert Chagoury will not be stranded. He has options. He has always had options. The Nigerian people, whose treasury funded those options, do not.
COUNT EIGHT: Fifty-Five Years, No Integration, No Intermarriage
I will say what others have been too careful to say, and I will say it plainly.
Gilbert Chagoury has operated in Nigeria for over fifty-five years. His group employs Nigerians. He has built on Nigerian land, obtained through a concession granted by a governor who is now president. He has extracted Nigerian contracts worth billions. He has received Nigeria’s second-highest national honour.
And in fifty-five years, the Chagoury family has not produced a single recorded intermarriage with an indigenous Nigerian family. Not one union. Not one child of mixed Chagoury-Nigerian parentage within the Black Nigerian community. The family has remained entirely within its Lebanese-Christian communal identity — socially separate, culturally distinct, endogamous — while extracting from the Nigerian state on a scale that no indigenous Nigerian family has ever been permitted to approach, let alone achieve.
I do not say this to promote ethnic hostility. I say it because it is the legal and social reality of what genuine national belonging means. A man who takes billions from a country’s public treasury while remaining entirely separate from that country’s indigenous social fabric is not Nigerian in any meaningful cultural or familial sense. He is an investor with a passport obtained from a military dictator.
That is not the same thing as being Nigerian in the way that the Amachrees are Nigerian. My grandfather Chief Sekin Amachree stood before the Willink Commission in London in 1958 and argued for the rights of Niger Delta minorities before this nation was even formally born. He did not do so as a visiting businessman. He did so as a man whose roots were in that soil across generations. My father Chief Godfrey Kio Jaja Amachree QC built the legal system of this country from the inside — as Solicitor-General, as Acting Attorney-General, as Permanent Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Justice, as the first African to serve as Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations.
We did not come to Nigeria to extract. We are Nigeria.
Do not tell me I cannot question who belongs here.
COUNT NINE: The FBI Files and Judge Beryl Howell
This is the count that concerns Gilbert Chagoury most. I know it. His lawyers know it. The Presidency knows it.
In the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, a case is currently proceeding before Judge Beryl Howell compelling the FBI and the DEA to disclose files relating to Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his associates. The court has set a disclosure deadline of June 2026.
These files exist within the broader landscape of American law enforcement’s decades-long interest in the financial networks surrounding the Abacha regime — networks in which Gilbert Chagoury was a central node. When those files are released, they will not be released into a vacuum. They will be released into a Nigerian political environment twelve months from a general election, with an active, documented, internationally published body of reporting — this reporting — already in place to contextualise every page.
I am not speculating about what those files contain. I am stating that they exist, that their release is court-ordered, and that Gilbert Chagoury should consider very carefully whether a defamation action filed between now and June 2026 is the wisest use of his legal resources.
A Final Word
You have built roads. You have built towers. You have built a city from reclaimed ocean. You have put your name on a gallery in the Louvre and a boulevard in Lebanon. You have made yourself, by any measure, a man of consequence.
But you helped a dictator steal from the poorest people on earth. You moved his money through Swiss banks while Nigerian children died in hospitals without medicine. A Geneva court said so. You paid for that verdict. Nigeria is still paying for what preceded it.
No concrete poured since then changes what the court found. No national honour conferred secretly on a birthday changes the record. No political operative publishing articles in The Punch changes what I have written — because what I have written is documented, sourced, and true.
I am Kio Amachree. I am my father’s son. And I know what an Amachree does when slandered.
We go to court.
Sue me, Mr. Chagoury. I will be there before you finish briefing your first lawyer.
Kio Amachree | Stockholm, Sweden | President, Worldview International
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