More than 60 Nigerian officials — many publicly accused of corruption — parked roughly $271 million in American real estate over the past 30 years, including properties in Aiken and Spartanburg highlighted by a Post and Courier investigation last year, global anti-corruption groups revealed.
The eye-popping $271 million total illustrates how foreign officials can use American real estate to hide money looted from their governments, according to the “Dirty Deeds” report by Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAAF) and the Anti-Corruption Data Collective.
Nigerians and their families appear to have bought many of these properties with cash while they held public offices, the groups’ report said.
The findings also expose holes in America’s anti-money-laundering laws and raise fresh questions about recent moves by the Trump administration to weaken anti-corruption laws.
Jimmy Kande, PPLAAF’s executive director, said the “unprecedented scale” of these American real estate purchases exposed gaps in how stolen money crosses borders “and settles quietly into foreign real estate.” He called on authorities in Nigeria and the United States to recover this “stolen wealth.”
Sambo Dasuki is one of the 61 Nigerian officials included in the groups’ report. Dasuki also was the focus of The Post and Courier’s “Power and Polo” report last year, which revealed how Dasuki paid nearly $1 million to buy a horse farm in Aiken in 2002 while he was head of Nigeria’s mint.
Dasuki later became Nigeria’s National Security Adviser, a top defense official. During that time, Dasuki transferred tens of millions of dollars to an illiterate Nigerian furniture maker who lived in a stunning Los Angeles mansion, according to documents uncovered by the newspaper, PPLAAF and the Organized Crime and Corruption Project.
Prosecutors in Nigeria have accused Dasuki of corruption in a case that has been ongoing for a decade.
The Dirty Deeds report also identified more than $20 million in U.S. real estate investments by Orji Uzor Kalu, a prominent Nigerian senator and business magnate, and his family members.
The Post and Courier previously reported that Kalu owns or has corporate and family connections to five properties in South Carolina worth at least $2 million on tax rolls and properties worth more than $4.7 million in the Charlotte metro area.
One of those properties is a 4-acre tract in the Saxon area of Spartanburg County. A man at the site who identified himself as Nnanna Utah told The Post and Courier last year that Kalu “can buy anything anywhere in the world he wants to,” but “likes South Carolina because he was doing business here even before he made a dime.”
Kalu was convicted on corruption charges in Nigeria, but in 2020, a higher court overturned the conviction and set Kalu free. Prosecutors with Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission pledged to retry the case but have yet to do so.
In all, the "Dirty Deeds" report identified 284 American properties worth $271 million that were linked to current and former high-level Nigerian officials. Of these, 152 properties worth approximately $177 million were acquired while the officials were in office.
The use of American real estate as a safe haven for money-laundering kleptocrats has widespread impacts in Nigeria and the United States.
“Every property listed in this report is a public service that was never delivered, a road not built, a clinic not staffed, a school without books,” said Olanrewaju Suraju, chairman of Human and Environmental Development Agenda, a Nigerian-based human rights group.
In the United States, large influxes of dirty money distort American real estate markets, hiking real estate prices for everyone, anti-corruption experts say. Cartels use anonymous companies to launder money. Lax transparency laws also facilitate consumer scams because thieves use shell companies to dodge law enforcement.
The Nigerian findings come amid a retreat in the United States against the fight to inject more transparency into American real estate purchases by foreign investors.
A bipartisan push in Congress led in 2021 to the Corporate Transparency Act, a law to deter money laundering, terrorist financing and tax evasion. New rules stemming from the law were set to go into effect last year, including requirements that real estate professionals identify the true buyers of properties.
But the Trump administration in 2025 said it wouldn’t enforce the law.