EXCLUSIVE: NNPC Executive Vice President Sophia Mbakwe Bought A USA Georgia Mansion That Costs $889,500 While Serving As Secretary Of The NNPC Tenders Board

$590,000 was the price, and about $177,000 of it came out of her own pocket as deposit, all inside a single week of August 2019. The woman who found that money in that week was no private businesswoman trading on her own account. She was a serving officer of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, the state oil company, and she was sitting in one of the most sensitive seats in the entire corporation, the office that services the board which clears NNPC contracts. At the official rate of the day, about N306 to the dollar, the price works out at about N180.6 million.

The paper trail sits in Fulton County, Georgia. By grant deed dated 2 August 2019, Sophia A Mbakwe bought 11395 Crestview Ter, Johns Creek, GA 30024 from the builder, Providence Group of Georgia, and the deed was recorded on 6 August 2019 as document 0603660011 in Deed Book 60366. SecretsReporters findings rest on the Fulton County deed record for the property, and the record is fuller than the name on the deed. Its residents list carries her in full as Sophia Apunegbe Mbakwe, the full documented name that stands on her United Kingdom company filings and across her NNPC career record.

The balance of the purchase was borrowed. The same week the deed was recorded, a conventional mortgage of $413,000 was taken on the house with Citadel Servicing Corp, dated 6 August 2019, a loan of about 70 percent of the price, worth about N126.4 million at the rate of the day. Between the deposit from her own pocket and the loan raised against the property, the entire purchase was assembled in days, in a suburb of Atlanta, by an official whose salary was paid in Abuja.

What the money bought stands in Brookmere at Johns Creek, Phase 1, Lot 153. The house was built in 2018, a year before she bought it off the builder. It carries five bedrooms, five bathrooms and a half bathroom, 3,405 square feet of living space across two storeys, a fireplace, and grounds of 0.21 acres. The record marks the property owner occupied.

The record carries one further detail, stated here exactly as it stands. Her mailing address on it is 11300 Crestview Ter, Suwanee, GA 30024, another house on the same street as the mansion itself.

Mbakwe came to the oil industry through the law. She took her LLB at Edo State University and passed through the Nigerian Law School in 1993. In 1995 she joined Statoil and spent 19 years with the Norwegian company, rising to National Procurement Manager. In 2015 she crossed to the Nigerian state oil company as its pioneer General Manager, Contracts and Procurement, and by October 2015 she was General Manager, Supply Chain.

From 2016 to 2020 she served as Secretary of the NNPC Tenders Board. The Tenders Board is the body that clears the corporation’s contracts, and its secretary is the officer through whose hands the papers of that clearance pass. On the August day the Georgia deed was signed, that secretaryship was the office she held, four years into an NNPC career that has never since taken her outside the corporation.

The rise continued after the purchase. She became Group General Manager, Supply Chain in 2021, Managing Director of NNPC Energy Services in October 2022, and Managing Director of Antan Producing Limited in early 2025. In April 2025 she was named Executive Vice President, Business Services of NNPC Limited, the office she holds today.

The Georgia house has grown richer while she climbed. Its estimated market value now stands at $889,500, a rise of $299,500 over what she paid for it. Her property taxes on it came to $6,869 in 2023, and the assessed value carried against it for 2025 is $427,680.

As a public officer, Mbakwe stood under the Code of Conduct that binds every elected, appointed and civil service officer in Nigeria on the same terms: declare all properties, assets and liabilities, her own, her spouse’s and those of her unmarried children below the age of eighteen, on assumption of office, at the end of every four years and at the end of her tenure, with any asset held outside Nigeria declared in the currency of the country where it sits. The Constitution provides that an asset acquired after a declaration which cannot be fairly attributed to income, a gift or an approved loan is presumed to have been acquired in breach of the Code unless the contrary is proved, and a breach carries removal from office, disqualification from holding public office for up to ten years, and seizure and forfeiture of the property in question to the state. A Georgia mansion bought in the middle of her Tenders Board years is an asset of the kind those declarations exist to capture. Whether it stands in them is a question her filings at the Bureau alone can settle. No filing open to the public speaks of the house. What speaks is the Fulton County record, deed, mortgage and all, and it has spoken in her full name since August 2019.

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