Tinubu’s son revealed as beneficial owner of corruption-tainted London mansion

A London mansion tainted by corruption Buhari It is owned by the son of Nigerian President-elect Bola Tinubu through an offshore company that the administration aimed to confiscate, which is also linked to the politician’s surrogates.

It revealed for the first time his connection to the Tinubu property – 32 Grove End Road, London – and his connection to the investigation into the Nigerian petrodollar fraud. PREMIUM TIMES as part of the Pandora Papers investigation. But in a new report on Tuesday, Bloomberg revealed that Seyi Tinubu is the beneficial owner of the property through Aranda Overseas Corporations, citing documents from the UK company.

Using leaked documents from the Pandora Papers, PREMIUM TIMES earlier reported that Aranda was introduced to the British Virgin Islands in November 1999 by Mr. Tinubu’s trusted surrogates – former Osun State Governor Gboyega Oyetola and friend Eluyemi Eludoyin. The accession came a month after Mr. Tinubu assumed power as governor of the business capital of Nigeria’s Lagos State.

But the Seyi Tinubu connection has just been revealed by Bloomberg after the UK introduced a new law requiring foreign companies investing in the country’s real estate market to declare their beneficial owners. Mr. Tinubu and his son Seyi declined to answer Bloomberg’s questions on the matter.

Seyi, who was active in his father’s campaign, is a businessman known for his interest in advertising.

Bought from a defector at a discount of £8m

Documents obtained from the UK land registry revealed that in July 2013 the property, with title number 340992, was bought for £11.95 million by Zavlil Holdings Ltd, a shell company in the British Virgin Islands, a well-known tax haven. Further documents obtained by PREMIUM TIMES revealed that Zavlil Holdings Limited is owned by Kolawole Aluko, an international fugitive wanted by law enforcement agencies in Nigeria and the United States for money laundering.

Kola Aluko and his associate, Jide Omokore, were indicted in the US and Nigeria for multi-billion fraud and money laundering violations, allegedly in collaboration with a former Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke.

In 2016, the Federal Government of Nigeria filed a Mareva warrant at a Federal High Court in Lagos seeking to confiscate a list of properties belonging to Mr. Aluko and Mr. Omokore worth $1.8 billion.

A Mareva order is a court order that freezes a defendant’s assets pending the outcome of the case.

In the suit against Messrs. Omokore and Aluko, their companies, Atlantic Energy Drilling Concepts Nigeria Limited and Atlantic Energy Brass Development Limited, the Nigerian Government asked the court to issue seven orders for the defendants to dispose of the assets. The government alleged that they were obtained through fraudulent means.

The government’s third prayer to the court was for an order restraining the accused from: “Giving any instructions, demanding, accepting, receiving payments and/or transacting, transferring, mortgaging or dealing in any way with the property of the Accused”. both houses and land in Abuja and Lagos and others outside Nigeria.’

The government then listed 17 properties in Abuja, Lagos, USA, Canada, Dubai, Switzerland and UK.

Among the properties listed was “Grove End Road, London”.

The court granted the government all its prayers. In October 2017, an attempt by the defendants to set aside the Mareva injunction against the estates was later dismissed by High Court judge Oluremi Oguntoyinbo.

But at the time (October 18, 2017) the court dismissed the defendant’s attempt, documents obtained from the UK land registry revealed that Mr. Aluko sold the house for £9 million to Mr. Tinubu’s deputy, Mr. Aranda. Oyetola and Eludoyin.

The steep discount at which the property was sold is extraordinary and has raised questions about whether Mr Aluko should sell the property in desperation, even while a court has placed a freezing order on it.

The UK, particularly the greater London area, is notable for its rapid rise in property values. According to PREMIUM TIMES’ estimate of the likely value of the property when it was bought by Aranda Overseas Corporation on the website of the UK’s National Building Society, which is the world’s largest building society, the property should be worth approximately 17 million. kilos Thus, Mr. Aluko sold the property at a discount of 8 million pounds.

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Mr. Tinubu uses the property for his stay in London and pictures of it became popular online when the politician was hosting political figures while he was convalescing in 2021. President Muhammadu Buhari, one of the guests whose government sought to confiscate the property.

Read PREMIUM TIMES’ original report on the property here.