By Fejiro Oliver
A SecretsReporters investigation has traced more than 150 companies registered in Nigeria, most of them sharing the same handful of addresses on Victoria Island, Lagos, and controlled on paper by fronts and domestic staff acting as directors. Company registry filings reviewed by our reporters show a corporate architecture our findings show was built for one purpose: to let Sterling Oil Exploration and Energy Production Company Limited (SEEPCO), chaired by Anthony Chukwueke and ultimately owned by fugitive Indian businessman Nitin Sandesara, inflate its costs, dodge Nigeria’s local content law, and move cash without a paper trail regulators can follow. The same investigation has obtained internal correspondence and bank payment orders that show a pattern of recurring cash payments from companies linked to SEEPCO to individuals occupying some of Nigeria’s most sensitive oil and immigration regulatory offices.
The companies our investigation traced
Dozens of these entities operate out of the same cluster of addresses, Plots 264, 266, 217, 211 and 218, Abiola Segun Ajayi Street, Victoria Island, Lagos. Many of them were originally registered as British Virgin Islands companies before being duplicated onto Nigeria’s own corporate register.
Among the companies our investigation traced to this network is Emporis Oil Technology (RC 827179), registered on 25 June 2009, which produces diesel in commercial quantities with no record of ever paying FIRS. Deep Frontline Shippers Limited (RC 885336), registered on 5 May 2010, is used to move crude and barges for the group. Parallel Runways Enterprise (RC 853229), registered on 4 November 2009, executes civil works contracts on OML 13 in Akwa Ibom. British Oil and Gas Exploration Nigeria Limited (RC 679064), registered on 23 January 2007, is the drilling contractor for every rig SEEPCO controls. Erudite Financial Point Limited is a British Virgin Islands-linked entity our investigation understands functions as an internal financing vehicle and should be probed for possible money laundering. Continental Capital Alliance Limited (RC 702928), registered on 8 August 2007, is the group’s insurance intermediary. West Africa Capital Limited, another British Virgin Islands-linked company, is used, our findings show, for undisclosed financial transactions.
The list continues with Silver Star Environmental Nigeria Limited (RC 786541), registered on 17 November 2008, which handles SEEPCO’s waste disposal and has been tied to disputed invoices. Yade Barge Operators Limited (RC 885313), registered on 5 May 2010, is the builder and operator of the barges ferrying crude to Agge. Sterling Petrochemicals and Fertilizers Limited (RC 692810), registered on 25 May 2007, is the group’s petrochemicals arm. Sterling Gas Genco Limited (RC 1347038), registered in July 2016, and Ashtavinayak Hydrocarbon Limited (RC 1271826), registered in July 2015, handle gas production on the side. Geo Seismic Survey Limited (RC 679300), registered in June 2007, runs SEEPCO’s seismic survey work, and Cement Bond Nig. Limited (RC 798210), registered in January 2009, handles cement supply contracts.
Our findings show that most of the directors listed against these companies are, in reality, low-level or domestic staff of SEEPCO who may not even be aware they hold that status on paper. All of them appear to share signatories and bank accounts concentrated at Zenith Bank, First Bank and FCMB, a pattern that, our investigation understands, a full BVN interrogation by regulators would expose in far greater depth than this report can.
How a $5 million well became a $14 million invoice
The mechanism is straightforward. SEEPCO’s own contractors put the real cost of drilling a well on OML 13 at between $4 million and $8 million. The invoices the company submitted to its joint-venture partner, NPDC, billed as much as $12 million to $14 million for the same wells, a gap our investigation understands is verifiable directly from the companies’ own bank statements and the invoices lodged with FIRS. Every dollar of that inflated cost of production is money SEEPCO deducts before it ever calculates what it owes Nigeria in Petroleum Profit Tax, which is precisely why that tax bill has stood at zero since 2011.
A well that costs $5 million to drill was invoiced to a Nigerian government partner at nearly three times that amount, and the difference is the same money SEEPCO uses to justify paying no Petroleum Profit Tax.
The laws a 150-company network like this one is built to break
Nigerian company law does not permit what our investigation found inside this network. Section 119 of the Companies and Allied Matters Act (CAMA) 2020, backed by the Persons with Significant Control Regulations 2022, requires every Nigerian company to disclose the identity of whoever actually owns or controls it, its persons with significant control as defined under Section 868, on a public register the Corporate Affairs Commission is required to maintain. Section 120 goes further, requiring anyone who holds that kind of control to declare it in writing within seven days of acquiring it. Filing a payroll clerk or a driver as a company’s director, while the real decisions are made from a SEEPCO office on Victoria Island, is not a paperwork shortcut. It defeats the entire purpose CAMA’s beneficial ownership regime exists to serve, stopping company structures from being used to hide who is really behind them.
A domestic staff member listed as a company director without knowing it is not a filing error under Nigerian law. It is exactly the kind of concealment the Companies and Allied Matters Act’s beneficial ownership rules were written to expose.
The Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development Act of 2010, Nigeria’s Local Content Act, adds a second layer. Section 3 of the Act requires that genuine Nigerian independent operators and indigenous service companies, ones that actually own the equipment and capacity they claim to, be given first and exclusive consideration for oil and gas contracts, and Section 68 empowers the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board to prosecute companies that dodge this requirement. A company set up on paper by SEEPCO itself, run by SEEPCO’s own staff, and existing for no purpose other than to be counted as a qualifying Nigerian contractor is not local content. It is the fronting arrangement the Act’s enforcement regime exists to catch, dressed up to look like compliance.
And every inflated invoice this network helped generate has its own separate legal exposure. Nigeria’s Petroleum Profit Tax Act treats the cost of producing crude as a deduction that must reflect what was genuinely spent, not what a company found convenient to claim. Billing $12 million to $14 million for a well that cost $4 million to $8 million to drill, then using that inflated figure to wipe out taxable profit, is not aggressive accounting. It is the kind of false costing that turns a tax return into a tax fraud.
The silence bought inside the regulatory agencies
According to the records our investigation obtained, a former Comptroller-General of the Nigeria Immigration Service received N1,000,000 monthly through a company called Ibmoka Global Ventures Limited, domiciled at Zenith Bank, before the payment channel was switched to a second company, Ecogreen Integrated Agro, at GTBank. The same records show the Comptroller-General’s Personal Assistant receiving parallel monthly payments through a separate company, Hilal Global Investment, domiciled at Sterling Bank, payments our investigation understands were the price of the immigration service’s silence over SEEPCO’s expatriate-heavy workforce.
The same documents point to payments made to top officials at the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA), consistent with a pattern our investigation found in which pollution assessments in SEEPCO’s operating areas repeatedly came back favourable to the company over the communities complaining about them. A further payment, our findings show, was made to a Director in the Federal Ministry of Justice around the time the Federal High Court considered, and ultimately denied, an Indian government request to extradite SEEPCO’s owner, Nitin Sandesara, over fraud allegations in India. The same month Nigeria’s courts were deciding whether to hand a fugitive over to India, our findings show, a Ministry of Justice official tied to that same case was receiving payments from a company linked to the fugitive’s own oil business, a business chaired, on the Nigerian side, by Anthony Chukwueke.
A trail of identical N20 million transfers
Beyond the individual payments, our investigation traced a wider pattern of fund movement between three related entities, Sterling Global Oil Resources Limited, SEEPCO and Sterling Exploration Limited, all banking at Zenith Bank, later extending to accounts at Union Bank and Access Bank. Between 2016 and 2020, our reporters counted dozens of transfers between these accounts in identical N20 million tranches, often repeated more than a dozen times within a single day. On 24 August 2018 alone, records show twenty-five separate N20 million transfers, totalling N500 million, moving between Sterling Global Oil Resources Limited and SEEPCO in a single sitting. A further eighteen N20 million tranches, totalling N360 million, moved between the same entities on 4 September 2018. Compliance experts describe this exact pattern, round-figure sums repeated dozens of times and cycled between related companies at the same bank, as a textbook layering technique used to obscure the origin or destination of funds.
The laws this money trail breaks, and why oil and gas makes it worse
Every payment described above lands squarely inside Nigeria’s anti-corruption statute book. The Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Act 2000 makes it an offence for anyone to offer or give gratification to a public officer under Section 9, and an offence for that officer to accept it under Section 8, each carrying up to seven years’ imprisonment. Section 18 specifically criminalises bribery of a public officer, Section 19 covers using one’s office or position to obtain gratification, and Section 22 targets bribery paid to secure assistance in relation to contracts, precisely the kind of arrangement our investigation found between SEEPCO-linked companies and officials positioned to control its immigration paperwork, its pollution record, and its exposure to extradition proceedings. Section 23 of the same Act imposes a legal duty on any public officer to report a bribery approach, and none of the officials named in our investigation’s documents appear to have done so.
The routing of these payments through shell companies rather than directly to the officials involved adds a second charge on top of the first. The Money Laundering (Prevention and Prohibition) Act 2022 criminalises exactly this kind of layering, where funds are moved through intermediary companies specifically to disguise their origin or true recipient, and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (Establishment) Act 2004 gives the EFCC direct authority to investigate and prosecute the pattern our reporters traced across Zenith, Union and Access Bank accounts. Bribing a public officer is a crime on its own under Nigerian law. Routing that bribe through a shell company to make it look like an ordinary business transfer is a second, separate crime, and our investigation found both happening in the same set of transactions.
What makes this particular money trail more dangerous than an ordinary bribery case is the sector it runs through. The officials our investigation ties to these payments do not sit in obscure back offices. A Comptroller-General of Immigration controls who is allowed to work in the country for a company whose entire workforce strategy depends on importing expatriate labour instead of hiring Nigerians. NOSDRA is the one agency legally empowered to certify whether SEEPCO’s oil spills are being honestly reported. And the Ministry of Justice director allegedly paid around the extradition case is a position with the power to influence whether Nigeria hands a fugitive wanted by another government’s courts over for prosecution. Bribing regulators in any industry is a crime. Bribing the exact regulators positioned to control an oil company’s labour compliance, environmental liability and its owner’s own legal exposure is corruption calibrated to protect the entire enterprise at once.
What our investigation could not obtain
What our investigation could not obtain, despite repeated requests, is the full call log and cargo record from Nigeria’s Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) for two vessels, the Folegandros (IMO 9793753) and the Front Dynamic (IMO 9874911), identified as having carried Okwuibome crude to India in 2013, in a shipment that made India, for the first time, a buyer of Nigerian crude outside its traditional European and American markets. Our reporters could also not obtain FIRS’s tax filings for the full list of companies named in this investigation, nor a 2022 investigative report on SEEPCO that sources inside the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) confirm exists but which has never been made public.
Taken together, this investigation points to one conclusion: a company owned by a man declared a fugitive by Indian courts, and chaired by the same regulator once sacked for improperly awarding oil licenses, has spent over a decade under-declaring production, avoiding tax, running an unauthorised export terminal, building a shell-company empire to hide who really controls it, and paying its way past the Nigerian officials whose job was to stop all of it. Nigeria’s finances, and the communities living in the shadow of Vishvamata’s gas flares, are the ones left to carry the cost.
