Buhari and Abba Kyari blocked my first offer to buy an oil field – Elumelu

Businessman Tony Elumelu has revealed that former President Muhammadu Buhari and his former Chief of Staff, the late Abba Kyari, blocked his first attempt to acquire an oil field in 2017.

Elumelu told The Financial Times in a recent interview that he had raised $2.5 billion to buy an oil field.

The Tony Elumelu Foundation co-founder said he was told Nigeria could not allow something of such strategic importance to fall into the hands of a private operator.

Elumelu said the logic was nonsense because he would buy 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.

Also: Government and security agencies must tell Nigerians who is behind oil theft – Elumelu

In 2021, Elumelu’s investment company Heirs Holdings acquired OML 17, an onshore oil field, 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 have each sold their 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.

Elumelu said he later learned why international oil companies partially pulled out of their onshore assets after criminal gangs began stealing crude oil from his pipelines.

A frustrated Elumelu took to social media in 2022 to vent his frustration when he was hit by oil theft. “How can we lose over 95 percent of oil production to thieves?” he had written.

According to the businessman, the situation has improved, but thieves still take about 18 percent of the production.

Asked who was behind the oil theft in the country, he said: “This is oil theft, we are not talking about stealing a bottle of coke that you can put in your pocket. The government should know; they should tell us. Look at America – Donald Trump was shot and very soon they knew the background of who shot him. Our security services should tell us who is stealing our oil. You bring ships into our territorial waters and we don’t know?”

Elumelu said he likes to take his destiny into his own hands and not live just for himself or his family because he knows people look up to him.