By Secrets Reporters
The numbers were so far apart they read like a printing error. In 2021, the real primary bank account of Dozy Mmobuosi’s Tingo Mobile in Nigeria opened with N50,000, about $120, and closed the year with less than N1.6 million, under $4,000. The bank statements shown to the company’s auditors told a different story: an opening balance of N11 billion and a closing balance above N53 billion.
That is the allegation shareholders of Tingo Group put before a federal court in New Jersey in a 97-page complaint obtained by SecretsReporters, and it is only the first exhibit in what they describe as a fraud built out of invented paperwork.
The complaint says the fabrication went further than doctored balances. The auditors were shown fixed-deposit statements for an account holding $24,096,933.50 in January 2022 and $489,000,246.56 by March 2023. When America’s Securities and Exchange Commission subpoenaed the bank’s actual records, the account did not exist. “There is not, and has never been” such an account, the complaint says, citing the subpoenaed records. Behind the statements sat a fictitious general ledger and false invoices, manufactured to match.
The shareholders’ suit is a civil action. United States prosecutors have separately charged Mmobuosi in New York with conspiracy, securities fraud and falsifying records, and the shareholders’ complaint maps, transaction by transaction, the money those charges will have to account for.
The complaint follows where the money went. More than $10 million raised as a handset financing loan from the British phone company Bullitt was routed through an attorney’s trust account; Bullitt never received it, the filing says. Another $16 million was siphoned into personal accounts. The spending list the plaintiffs recite runs through luxury cars, private jet travel, a gala in a five-star London ballroom, and the failed bid to buy Sheffield United football club.
Then came the share sales. The complaint says Mmobuosi moved more than 10 million Agri-Fintech shares out through a Swiss bank account for over $2 million, mostly before the fraud became public, and without filing the insider-trading disclosures American law requires of company officers. In total, the plaintiffs say, at least 115 million Agri-Fintech shares were sold or transferred from early 2022, worth roughly $226 million. In October and November 2023, another 12 million Tingo Group shares went for $10.4 million.
The paper trail keeps producing impossibilities. Tingo Foods, the Nigerian food processor Mmobuosi founded in September 2022 and sold to Tingo five months later for a $204 million promissory note at 5 percent annual interest, supposedly generated $577.2 million in revenue and $143.5 million in profit in a 50-day window, the complaint says. The $1.6 billion Delta food processing facility shown to investors in glossy renderings was, according to the filing, a stock photograph of an oil refinery.
Tingo claimed $780 million in Nigerian cash holdings while reporting $1.444 million in interest income for the year. Then, in a single quarter, $725 million of the claimed cash simply evaporated from the books, the complaint says.
The auditors were paid while all of it passed. Deloitte’s Israeli arm collected $1.6 million in audit fees for 2022 and then resigned in January 2024. Gries and Associates, which blessed a roughly $3.6 billion goodwill figure, was later sanctioned by America’s audit watchdog, with its partner barred for a year. Inside the company, a director resigned in April 2023 rather than approve the annual report, the filing says.
The shareholders put a number on the NWASSA claim at the centre of the business. Tingo Mobile claimed its NWASSA money-transfer platform processed between $12 billion and $12.7 billion in transactions. The entire country of Nigeria processed $10.8 billion in the same period.
