By Emmanuel Nduka
Nigerian businessman Tony Elumelu has disclosed how former President Muhammadu Buhari and his now late chief of staff Abba Kyari, rejected his company’s request to buy an oilfield despite raising billions of dollars to fund the deal.
Elumelu told Financial Times in an interview released on Friday that his investment company, Heir Holdings, had approached the Buhari administration to acquire an oilfield with an offer of about $2.5 billion in 2017.
He said the former president and his powerful chief of staff declined the offer, asserting that they could not allow an oilfield of such “strategic importance to fall into the hands of a private operator”.
A disappointed Elumelu said the rejection “defied logic” given that “he would have been purchasing it from a foreign company”, according to Financial Times.
The Chairman of UBA, said he soon discovered the bane of the petroleum industry, oil theft, which was a major factor influencing international oil companies’ divestment from onshore assets in the West African country.
Having acquired a 45 per cent stake in an oilfield about three years ago, Elumelu said he was impacted by the activities of criminal gangs who constantly robbed his pipeline and stole enough crude that caused his company to shut down production.
This frustration, he said, prompted him to tweet in 2022, “How can we be losing over 95 per cent of oil production to thieves?”
“The government should know, they should tell us the masterminds behind the oil theft. Our security agencies should tell us who is stealing our oil. You bring vessels to our territorial waters, and we don’t know?” he said.
Buhari is yet to respond to Elumelu’s claims.
