The renowned Nigerian businessman Tony Elumelu has revealed that former President Muhammadu Buhari and his late Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari, rejected his company’s proposal to purchase an oilfield despite having secured billions of dollars in funding for the acquisition.
Heir Holdings, Elumelu’s investment company, approached the Buhari administration in 2017 with an offer of about $2.5 billion to buy the oilfields, the business tycoon said in an interview with Journalists on Friday.
However, Elumelu said the former president and his right-hand man rejected the offer, saying they could not allow such “strategic importance to fall into the hands of a private operator.”
Elumelu told the Journalist that the refusal “defied logic” given that “he would have been purchasing it from a foreign company.”
Elumelu, the UBA chairman, said he quickly realized that oil theft, a plague in the oil industry, was a major factor encouraging international oil companies to sell their onshore assets.
According to Elumelu, after he bought a 45 percent stake in the oil field about three years ago, his company was affected by the activities of criminal gangs who continuously robbed the pipeline and stole so much crude that his company had to halt production.
According to him, frustration led him to tweet in 2022, “How can we be losing over 95 percent 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?”
Buhari’s spokesperson, Garba Shehu, did not immediately respond to Journalists’ request for comment on Elumelu’s claims, as he did not respond to SMS and WhatsApp messages sent to Elumelu.
