The Chairman of Heirs Holdings, Mr. Tony Elumelu, has disclosed how former President Muhammadu Buhari and his chief of staff, the late Abba Kyari, blocked his initial move to acquire an oil field in 2017.
Elumelu, who is also the Chairman of the United Bank for Africa Plc, said this in an interview in The Financial Times. According to him, Heirs Holdings was looking to purchase an oilfield since 2017, and had raised $2.5 billion to purchase one.
But he alleged that in a twist, Buhari and the late Abba Kyari, blocked the deal.
He said he was told that Nigeria couldn’t allow something of such strategic importance to fall into the hands of a private operator.
This, according to Elumelu, defied logic since he would have been purchasing it from a foreign company.
However, Elumelu’s decision to buy a 45 percent stake in an oilfield three years ago surprised many. International oil companies such as Shell, Total and Eni were selling off their shallow water assets in Nigeria, with local companies taking charge.
In 2021, his Heirs Holdings acquired OML 17, an onshore oilfield as part of a deal that included $1.1 billion in financing from a consortium of global and regional banks and investors.
Shell, Total and Eni each had sold stakes in the OML 17 field, which has a production capacity of 27,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day and estimated reserves of 1.2 billion barrels of oil equivalent, Heirs said.
When asked if he felt like getting in at the end of the party by buying an oil asset in the age of energy transition and environmental, social and governance investing, Elumelu said: “We wanted to become a Fortune 500 company and we estimated what we needed. It’s not naira, it’s huge dollars.”
Energy security is crucial for a country that doesn’t produce enough electricity for its roughly 200 million citizens, he added.
He said he discovered first-hand why international oil companies were partly divesting from onshore assets, after criminal gangs began stealing crude from his pipelines.
