Nigerian Prince Billed Biden's Medicaid $36 million - then built a palace with a golden statue of himself

Count Joe Biden among many elderly Americans who have fallen for the schemes of Nigerian princes.

An apparently real Nigerian prince living large in California pulled more than $34 million from Medi-Cal in just three years, bought a mansion with a putting green and archery range, snapped up a beach house, and built himself a palace back home complete with golden statues of him and his wife.

Chief Nathan Ogbatue - crowned Owelle of the farming town of Abatete in 2012 - runs California Home Health Agency out of a strip-mall office in Riverside with the blinds pulled tight. His company billed Medicaid a paltry $89,570 in 2018. By 2023 it was raking in more than $17 million. Add 2024's $13 million-plus and the three-year haul tops $34 million. City Journal's investigation put the overall figure above $36 million.

The money arrived at the same time Ogbatue and his wife Agnes went on a buying spree: a $2.7 million six-bedroom Riverside palace of their own, a $1.9 million Redondo Beach house previously tied to another Medicare-fraud case, and another $1.4 million in local properties. Total: more than $7 million in California real estate in two years. Back in Nigeria he funded a brand-new palace that opened last December. Videos show him arriving by motorcade while a videographer called him "half man, half god." Golden statues of the couple stand outside. Locals cheer him as a philanthropist who builds roads and hands out food.

$4 million home in Newport Beach was a part of the Nigerian prince's portfolio. Medi-Cal and Medicaid are Federally sponsored, so no matter where in the US you lived during the Biden years, you paid for this.

Nigerian Prince billed California Medicaid $36 million - then built a palace with a golden statue of himself

California's own records show the agency stopped filing mandatory utilization reports after 2019 - the documents that would show how many patients it actually treated and who did the work. The state kept paying anyway. Investigators who knocked on the office door found a woman who confirmed Ogbatue was the man in the Nigerian statue photos, then told them to call him. He picked up, denied doing "anything funny," claimed the company "worked really hard," and refused to say how many people it employs. His lawyer later insisted the firm uses more than 100 contracted nurses and aides and that pandemic demand plus new contracts explain the explosion in billings.

Fraud experts who reviewed the numbers weren't buying it. One called the volume of nursing and home-health-aide claims "extraordinary" and noted the agency shot to the top of statewide rankings almost overnight. Another said the combination of a tiny office, missing reports, and unidentifiable staff has "all the earmarks of a fraudulent shell company." No charges have been filed. The agency is still licensed and open. Ogbatue told reporters he has "nothing to fear." California taxpayers may feel differently.