A fraudster carried out one of the biggest scams in history by telling the bank he was building an airport

A Nigerian bank manager managed to outsmart a large local bank with a whopping £200 million – simply by telling the bank he needed the millions to build an airport.

Emmanuel Nwude is actually the former director of the Union Bank of Nigeria – but he used his expertise in a non-ethical way when he called a Brazilian bank executive on behalf of another major banking figure.

Nwude called Nelson Sakaguchi, of Brazil’s Banco Noroeste – posing as Central Bank of Nigeria Governor Paul Ogwuma when he asked for a huge sum to build an airport.

Shockingly, MailOnline finds out that this individual phone call was enough to fulfill Mr. Nwude’s requests, and Sakaguchi placed complete trust in the Nigerian bank manager.

Without completing any background checks, Sakaguchi approved Nwude’s demand – but only if he got a massive £8 million commission from the new airport – which would never get built anyway.

Over a three-year period – 1995-1998 – the Brazilian banker innocently paid Nwude and his associates a huge sum of around £190 million – all for the airport whose existence no one had bothered to check.

But one day in 1997, the Brazilian bank examined its spending before being bought by the financial multinational Santander and noticed that almost half of their money was in the Cayman Islands, a notorious tax haven.

Alarm bells finally started ringing and Banco Noroeste wondered how this all went under the radar.

This led to legal proceedings showed that Nwude had in fact defrauded the Brazilian bank of a generous £190 million over a three-year period.

Unfortunately, Banco Noroeste was so benign that the bank owners eventually paid the costs out of their own pockets so that the sale of Nwude would be successful – before the 2001 collapse.

The airport that was never built… Nwude called Nelson Sakaguchi, of Brazil’s Banco Noroeste – posing as Central Bank of Nigeria Governor Paul Ogwuma when he asked for a huge sum to build an airport build

Nwude and his associates were taken to court years later in 2004 and were kicked out and re-arrested before being charged in another court.

The fraudsters decided to plead not guilty to more than a hundred counts of fraud.

Things got worse when Nwude tried to get out of trouble through bribery by paying £60,000 when one of his accomplices admitted their misdeeds.

Despite being a large sum again, his bribe was denied – and the trial even got Sakaguchi as a witness for this, making the fraudster afraid to confess to his crimes.

He eventually pleaded guilty in an effort to get a lighter sentence.

Emmanuel Nwude was sentenced to 25 years for fraud, but was released from prison in 2006.

Now this type of scam is affectionately referred to as a 419 scam, and Nwude contributed to it one of the biggest financial frauds in history.