A recent investigation by Drop Site News (DSN) has revealed how Jeffrey Epstein, the late American financier and convicted sex offender, collaborated with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to profit from the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria.
Email exchanges released by the US Justice Department in 2018 showed Epstein facilitating talks between Jide Zeitlin, then-chair of Nigeria’s Sovereign Investment Fund, and Sultan Ahmad bin Sulayem, former chairman of DP World, a UAE-based logistics giant. Epstein died in a New York jail in 2019.
According to DSN, the discussions focused on how Zeitlin could leverage his influence in Nigeria to help Sulayem secure potential shipping terminals in Lagos and Badagry—projects that prior talks with Nigerian presidents since 2005 had failed to materialize.
DP World reportedly refused to invest in an industrial zone in Nigeria unless it could fully control the surrounding port. Sulayem resigned from DP World on February 13 after his ties to Epstein became public.
Epstein corresponded almost daily with Barak, who actively sought to expand Israeli-Nigerian security relations. After resigning as Israeli Defence Minister in 2013, Barak reportedly used his Nigerian security connections to create energy and investment opportunities for associates in Israel.
The DSN report also highlighted Epstein’s interest in broader technological and financial penetration in Nigeria. “We should think about the growing emerging role of cards and phones in economic exchange and the future of money,” Barnaby Marsh, an investment advisor and friend of Epstein, wrote after receiving a snippet of Epstein’s “Tale of the Slave.” Marsh also shared an article on Nigeria’s use of electronic identity cards and biometric databases.
In 2015, Barak and a business partner invested $15 million in FST Biometrics, founded by former Israeli military intelligence chief Aharon Ze’evi Farkash. Its Basel biometric system, originally deployed at Israel-Gaza crossings to control Palestinian worker movement, was marketed in Nigeria as a counter-terrorism tool. Barak reportedly facilitated the sale of the technology to Babcock University to deter Boko Haram attacks, while promoting broader population-control capabilities to African governments.
DSN noted that the security cooperation allowed Barak and Epstein to profit from instability in Nigeria while advancing the political and economic interests of Israeli firms. In 2020, the World Bank supported a partnership with the Israel National Cyber Directorate and Toka Group—another ex-intelligence startup co-founded by Barak—to directly contribute to Nigeria’s national cybersecurity infrastructure.
The report underscores how Epstein and Barak combined strategic security interventions and investment opportunities to exploit conflict-driven chaos in Nigeria.
