Where the Mambilla money landed tells a second story. It's about the method, not just the men.

$500,000 to Atiku's then-wife. $1.74 million to Dasuki's son. Smaller sums to Agunloye, filed as medical expenses. A payment linked to Yola through an intermediary. The tribunal even found Adesanya set up an offshore company for Dasuki's children, with a planned share transfer that may never have gone through.

The distance between the official and the money is part of what makes these transactions so difficult to interpret. A system built to catch direct payments watches a minister's own account closely. It doesn't watch his son's account the same way. It can't see his wife's account in New York at all. None of the routes the tribunal traced needed a Nigerian bank at any point. A Swiss account paid a US account. An offshore company held shares meant for children living abroad. Every step of the money's journey happened somewhere Nigerian regulators have no automatic reach.

That distance also makes scrutiny harder to apply evenly. A civil servant's own account can get frozen over one flagged transfer, no context needed, no tribunal, no foreign court. A payment tied to a contract worth billions moved through a wife's account for over two decades before a tribunal in Paris, not a commission in Abuja, found it. The gap isn't just about who has more money to hide. It's about whose transactions are built, from the start, to be looked for in the wrong place.

The EFCC's new team isn't investigating five officials. It's investigating a web of relatives, aides and intermediaries built around them, in at least three different countries. Whether that team can follow money across jurisdictions the way the Paris tribunal's lawyers did, with subpoena power a Nigerian commission doesn't automatically have abroad, is its own open question.

Getting bank records out of Switzerland or the United States usually means a mutual legal assistance request, a formal government-to-government ask that can take months to answer even when the receiving country cooperates fully. The tribunal that surfaced this money didn't need Nigeria's permission to subpoena Adesanya's own records, because he was the one suing. The EFCC doesn't have that shortcut. It has to ask, and wait, for information about people who have every reason not to make the asking easy.

That's the practical version of the question this story keeps raising. It's also the one that decides whether this file ends differently than the last one this size did.