the already indebted nation further into hock to foreign creditors.

Bush did not respond to a request for comment for this story, but as he prepares to announce his bid for the presidency, questions still linger about the exact part he played in a deal that the Justice Department said took advantage of both the Nigerian people and American taxpayers.



Bush’s involvement with the Nigeria project began in 1989, the year after his father was elected president, when he formed a partnership with J. David Eller, the CEO of a family-owned Deerfield Beach, Florida, company now called MWI, short for Moving Water Industries. Eller’s father founded the outfit in 1926. It manufactures large-scale water pumps used for flood control, agriculture, mining, and other industrial projects. (Some of its pumps endedup in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.)

Asked what percentage of the MWI equipment sold to Nigeria had gone unused, a former vice president at the company replied, “Ninety percent.”

Bush and Eller had become friends through Florida GOP circles in the early 1980s. Eller was a big Broward County Republican activist and donor and had landed a slot on the state lottery commission during the administration of Republican Gov. Bob Martinez, who had tapped Bush as his commerce secretary in 1986.

An engineer known for his rumpled hair, wide ties, snakeskin boots, and Bible-thumping Southern Baptist faith, Eller had taken his father’s company global in the 1970s. In the early 1980s, the firm discovered that it could help Nigeria obtain financing from the US Export-Import Bank to buy MWI’s pumps