Businessman Tony Elumelu has revealed that former President Muhammadu Buhari and his former chief of staff, the late Abba Kyari, blocked his first move to acquire an oil field in 2017.
Elumelu told The Financial Times in a recent interview that he had raised $2.5 billion to purchase an oil field.
The co-founder of Tony Elumelu Foundation said he was told that Nigeria couldn’t allow something of such strategic importance to fall into the hands of a private operator.
Elumelu said the logic made no sense because he would be buying it from a foreign company.
“We wanted to become a Fortune 500 company and we estimated what we needed. It’s not naira, it’s huge dollars,” he said.
In 2021, Elumelu’s investment company 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.
According to Heirs Holdings, Shell, Total and Eni each had sold stakes in the OML 17 field, which has production capacity of 27,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day and estimated reserves of 1.2 billion barrels of oil equivalent.
Elumelu said he later discovered why international oil companies were partly divesting from onshore assets, after criminal gangs began stealing crude from his pipelines.
A frustrated Elumelu vented on social media in 2022 when hit by oil theft.
“How can we be losing over 95 per cent of oil production to thieves?” he had written.
The businessman said the situation has improved but thieves still take away about 18 per cent of production.
Asked who was behind oil theft in the country, he said: “This is oil theft, we’re not talking about stealing a bottle of Coke you can put in your pocket. The government should know; they should tell us. Look at America — Donald Trump was shot at and quickly they knew the background of who shot him. Our security agencies should tell us who is stealing our oil. You bring vessels to our territorial waters and we don’t know?”
Elumelu said he likes to take his destiny in his own hands and doesn’t live for himself nor family alone because he knows people look up to him.
