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In March 1989, Jeb Bush arrived in Nigeria to a royal welcome. More than 100,000 American-flag waving Nigerians lined the streets of Gombe to watch as the US president’s son was honored with a 1,300-horse “durbar,” a festival typically reserved for heads of state and religious holidays. Bush later met with Nigerian dictator Ibrahim Babangida, who had come to power in a 1985 military coup. They chatted about Cuban human rights and the failed nomination of John Tower, Bush’s father’s pick for defense secretary.

But the president’s then-36-year-old son was not visiting Nigeria on a diplomatic mission. He had come to promote an industrial water pump company. The visit—and the $82 milliondeal tied to it—would form one of the more controversial episodes of Bush’s business career and dog him for years after he jumped into politics. The deal became notorious because of allegations, outlined in thousands of pages of court documents, that the transaction had been greased through massive bribes to Nigerian officials paid for by American taxpayer money loaned through the US Export-Import Bank. The deal triggered a federal criminal investigation, as well as nearly two decades of civil litigation by the US Department of Justice that in 2013 resulted in a federal jury finding that the water pump company, MWI Corp., had defrauded the federal government of millions of dollars.

Bush has long tried to distance himself from the deal. He was not a defendant in the Justice