By Secrets Reporters
Access Bank Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer Roosevelt Michael Ogbonna bought a £15 million mansion on The Bishops Avenue in Hampstead, London, and the mortgage that part-financed the purchase came from Access Bank UK Limited. Companies House records examined by SecretsReporters show that Ogbonna is himself a director of Access Bank UK, and has sat on its board since 20 March 2017. The borrower and the lender share the same man.
Bloomberg reported on 1 October 2025 that Ogbonna had purchased the mansion on The Bishops Avenue, the Hampstead street known as Billionaires' Row, for £15 million, completing the deal in August 2025. UK Land Registry documents cited in the reporting that followed, by FreelaNews and by City A.M., record that the purchase was partly financed through a mortgage issued by Access Bank UK, the British subsidiary of the Access Bank group. The house had been listed at £17 million before the sale. It carries eight bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a swimming pool, a spa, a home cinema and entertainment suite, a lift serving all floors and landscaped gardens. The purchase was one of only two sales completed on the avenue in 2025.
The Access Bank UK Limited board seat stands in the British register in its own right. The company, number 06365062 on the Companies House register, carries Roosevelt Michael Ogbonna, a Nigerian national, as a Non-Executive Director, appointed on 20 March 2017 and still active in the role. Ogbonna has led Access Bank Plc in Lagos as Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer since May 2022. He joined the bank in 2002 and served five years as Deputy Managing Director before taking the top job. In August 2025, the same month the mansion purchase completed, he resigned as a Non-Executive Director of Access Holdings Plc, the group's listed parent, under the Central Bank of Nigeria corporate governance guidelines capping holding company boards at nine directors. He kept the Access Bank chief executive seat and the Access Bank UK directorship.
The scale of that director lending stands in Access Bank UK's own audited accounts, filed at Companies House on 25 September 2026 for the year ended 31 December 2025, and it has not been reported anywhere. Note 30 of the accounts, the related party transactions note, records that there were 10 mortgage facilities approved or advanced to directors of the parent bank in 2025, with a fair value balance of $18,018 thousand at the year end, against five facilities and $1,507 thousand in 2024. The facilities are buy to let and regulated mortgage types, on capital repayment or interest only payment, at a current rate of interest of 6.25 per cent, with terms ranging from five years to twenty years. The same note records 10 portfolio secured loans approved and advanced to directors of the parent bank in 2025, with a fair value balance of $11,232 thousand, against six loans and $1,923 thousand in 2024, and deposits by directors of the parent bank of $407 thousand at the year end. The note names no director against any facility. It closes the subject with one sentence: all transactions with directors are at an arm's length basis.
A bank lending to its own staff is a routine transaction, and a mortgage from an employer bank is not an offence. The procedure company law prescribes for it is declaration and independent approval. Under the United Kingdom Companies Act 2006, a director must declare the nature and extent of any interest in a transaction with his company. Nigerian company and banking governance rules subject related party transactions to board scrutiny and disclosure. No public filing records whether Ogbonna declared his interest in the Access Bank UK mortgage, whether he withdrew from its consideration, or which directors approved the loan and on what terms. The accounts disclosure, the first account of the lending to appear anywhere, gives the class of loans and no borrower's name. Access Bank and Access Bank UK have stated no position on the loan in public. A representative for Ogbonna did not respond to Bloomberg's request for comment on the purchase, and no denial or explanation has been issued by the bank or the man since the reporting of October 2025.
Ogbonna holds a second London paper trail in the register, and it has never been reported. On 25 October 2021, while he was Deputy Managing Director of Access Bank, a private company named AVRIL & ATO UK LIMITED was incorporated at Companies House, company number 13702413, with £1,000 of share capital and a stated business that includes the buying and selling of its own real estate. Ogbonna stood on the incorporation as a director and a person with significant control. Companies House files the appointment under the same single officer record, Roosevelt Michael Ogbonna, date of birth April 1974, as his Access Bank UK board seat. Beside him stood his wife, Chioma Uchechukwu Ogbonna, a British citizen born in August 1974, for whom the company is her sole United Kingdom appointment. On 10 March 2022, about two months before Ogbonna became chief executive of Access Bank, he resigned as a director of AVRIL & ATO and ceased to be a person with significant control. His wife remains the sole active director and controller. The company files dormant accounts, most recently for the period to October 2025. No filing connects AVRIL & ATO to the Bishops Avenue mansion, which the reporting records as bought in Ogbonna's own name.
The group's own filings put Ogbonna's holding in Access Holdings Plc at 169,730,544 shares, 0.32 per cent of the company. The documents on the British register establish the structure of the mansion loan without assistance from any other publication: the chief executive of Nigeria's largest bank by assets borrowed toward his £15 million London house from a bank whose board he has sat on for more than eight years. Whether he declared that interest to that board, and whether he left the room when it decided, stands unanswered on every public record.
