Dew Mayson later ran for president in Liberia, but received only one-half a per cent of the votes. The country’s truth commission labelled him a dubious ally of Liberia’s dictators and questions were asked about where his sudden wealth and fortune had come from.3
One of the companies that were important in the building up of Mayson’s fortune was Royal Marine & Spares. According to the documents, the company now owned the Thunder.
In October 2013 the ships register had received another letter from Royal Marine & Spares. The owners of the Thunder wanted to change the ship’s name to the Raz – to “reflect the management’s new visions” as the letter signed by Dew Mayson read. But the address the company gave for its headquarters in Lagos did not exist.
“A careful assessment of your documents has revealed a number of inconsistencies. Your presence is therefore requested,” the Nigerian ships register replied.
Then everything related to the Thunder fell silent in Nigeria.
Warredi Enisuoh begins digging into the roles of the alleged owners. Royal Marine & Spares has a well-known history as an oil service company in Lagos, but he can’t find any connection to fishing vessels or fishing licences, other than in the Thunder’s documents. Do Mayson and Macauley really own the Thunder? Or have their names and signatures been stolen to hide the identities of the true owners?
The Interpol group wants the Nigerian authorities to ask South Africa for help in arresting the Thunder. South Africa has ships and resources to stop the trawler, but as a flag state, it is Nigeria that rules over the Thunder’s fate, at least in a legal sense.
Enisuoh is uncertain. There is nothing in the country’s laws stating that it is a criminal offence for Europeans, Indonesians and Latin Americans to fish in international waters. The Thunder will very likely just be forced ashore in a large-scale and costly operation only to be released again. It will be embarrassing for everyone involved, Enisuoh thinks.
There is also another obstacle. In order to ask South Africa for help he must go via the Nigerian foreign affairs authorities, a virtually impenetrable bureaucracy. Enisuoh is also worried that an untrustworthy servant within the bureaucracy might leak the entire plan, warning the owners. If the captain on the Thunder is alerted, the battle can be lost before it has begun.
Warredi Enisuoh begins discretely investigating whether it is really the multimillionaire Mayson and Minister Macauley who own the Thunder.
When he one day marches up to the powerful Coast Guard Director Patrick Akpobolokemi’s office on the eighth floor of the yellowish-brown office building a few blocks from the harbour in Lagos, he notices a book lying on one of the tables. On the cover there is a photograph of Dew Mayson, the suspected owner of the Thunder.
Is it a coincidence that a book about Mayson is lying on the table? Has there been a leak? Has somebody in the Interpol group unexpectedly blabbed to someone, who then sold the information to someone else? Has Mayson gone to the head of the coast guard to have the investigation stopped? If so, his career is very likely over. At worst, his life can be in danger, Warredi Enisuoh thinks.
Before he hurries out of the director’s office, Enisuoh asks questions about a subject completely unrelated to the search for the Thunder’s owners. Out in the corridor he fishes out his telephone and calls one of the Norwegian members of the Interpol group. No, nobody in the group has mentioned his investigations to anyone else, he is told.
Now there is no turning back. Enisuoh must meet with the powerful Mayson in person. He summons his courage and returns to Akpobolokemi and asks him how he knows Mayson. The head of NIMASA tells him that he has recently had a meeting with Mayson and a man from the oil industry. They wanted to discuss business prospects.
When Enisuoh and Dew Mayson finally meet, the powerful millionaire states that he has never heard of the Thunder. If that is true, someone must have used Mayson’s company to hide the true owners of the Thunder.4
Enisuoh contacts the shipping authorities in ports the Thunder has visited previously and soon receives ship’s documents that were supposedly issued in Nigeria. The Thunder’s registration certificate states that Nigeria has given the vessel permission to fish in foreign waters. That is not the case. And how can the Nigerian authorities have issued detailed safety and pollution certificates to a vessel that has never been inspected in Nigeria? The documents must be forgeries. The bureaucrat, who has allegedly signed the documents on behalf of NIMASA, denies having any knowledge of them whatsoever.
If Mayson and Macauley have nothing to do with the Thunder, where then do the signed company documents come from? Is there a spider operating on the inside of the Nigerian company register that has copied company documents and records of proceedings from meetings of the board of directors of Royal Marine & Spares and then sold them?
The American authorities have called Lagos an epicentre for identity theft and financial crime.5 By using post office boxes, the kidnappers can ensure that the correspondence of a given company never ends up in the hands of its actual owners. In the same way that somebody acquires a fake driver’s licence by using the identity of a deceased person, someone could have used the identity of the dormant company Royal Marine & Spares to procure ship’s documents for the Thunder. That must be how it was done, Enisuoh thinks.
He tries to track down the two consultants who procured the ship’s registration in Nigeria. He has names and photographs, but the bankrupt amusement park which they gave as their address was recently raided by the police and environmental protection authorities
