By On 8 February 2013, in Fort Bend County, Texas, a warranty deed moved the house at 25223 Hazel Ranch Drive, Katy, into two new names: Akinjorin K Shada and Tokunbo O Shada. The first of those names belongs to a man who had already spent eleven years inside the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, who has never worked anywhere else since, and who today sits as Executive Director, Crude and Condensate, at NNPC Trading Limited, the arm of the state oil company that sells Nigeria’s crude oil to the world. SecretsReporters scrutiny of the Fort Bend County record shows the house has stood in the Shada name from that February day to this one, thirteen years of ownership that no public filing in Nigeria has ever mentioned.
The house stands in Katy Creek Ranch, Section 3, Block 3, Lot 2, a brick and stone single storey built in 2008 by Legend Classic Homes Limited. It carries three bedrooms and two bathrooms across 1,493 square feet of living space, an attached two car garage, a fireplace and an open porch, set on 0.12 acres in one of the most sought after school districts in the Houston suburbs. The Shadas bought it from Jeffrey M Tillson and Corinne N Tillson, the couple who had taken it from the builder in October 2008, and the deed was recorded at the county on 12 February 2013 under document number 0000016961.
The county record carries no price for the 2013 sale, and this report invents none. What the record carries today is an estimated market value of $306,877 for the house, a 2025 assessed value of $296,043, and a 2025 tax bill of $4,840, which means the Shada family has been meeting American property taxes on a Texas house, year after year, on the far side of the Atlantic from the Abuja offices where Akinjorin Shada has spent his entire working life.
The record is equally plain about how the house is held. It is marked not occupied by its owners. The owners’ mailing address on the county file is not the Katy house at all but 14781 Memorial Drive, Houston, and the county’s own estimate puts the rent the Hazel Ranch Drive house would command at $1,953 a month. No mortgage taken by the Shadas appears anywhere on the record. The only loan on the file belongs to the couple who sold to them, an FHA loan of $130,942 raised by the Tillsons in 2008, five years before the Shadas arrived on the deed.
The career running underneath the deed is a straight line through the commercial heart of the NNPC. Akinjorin Kehinde Shada, a chemical engineering graduate of the Federal University of Technology, Minna, with an MBA in International Management from Royal Holloway, University of London, spent one year as a management trainee at Equitorial Trust Bank and then joined the NNPC as a graduate trainee in 2002. He rose through the crude trade itself: commercial officer for crude oil sales, cargo programmer from 2014 to 2020, production programmer from 2021 to 2023, Manager, Procurement at NNPC Exploration and Production Limited, Executive Director, Crude and Products at NNPC Shipping and Logistics Limited in 2023 and 2024, and now Executive Director, Crude and Condensate at NNPC Trading Limited.
Those are not back office seats. Cargo programming and crude marketing are where the corporation decides which cargoes of Nigerian crude move, to whom and on what schedule, and a man who has held office in that corridor for more than two decades while a house in Texas quietly accumulated taxes, value and rent potential in his name has questions of record to answer, whatever the answers turn out to be. The house was bought eleven years into that career, long after a graduate trainee’s salary had given way to the pay of the corporation’s commercial cadre, and it has been held through every promotion since.
As a public officer, Shada has stood under the declaration duty the Code of Conduct lays on every elected, appointed and civil service officer in Nigeria: the Code of Conduct Bureau requires public officers to declare their assets, and the assets of their spouses and their unmarried children below the age of eighteen, on assumption of office, at the end of every four years and at the end of their tenure, and the duty reaches property held anywhere in the world, an asset abroad declared in the currency of the country where it sits. The Constitution presumes an asset acquired after a declaration that cannot be fairly attributed to income, a gift or an approved loan 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 to the state. The Katy house has passed through more than a decade of those declaration points in the joint names of Akinjorin Shada and his wife, Tokunbo Oluwatoyin Shada.
No filing open to the Nigerian public speaks of 25223 Hazel Ranch Drive. Whether the house stands inside the declarations Akinjorin Shada has filed at the Code of Conduct Bureau across his NNPC career is a matter his filings at the Bureau alone can settle, and the Bureau’s register is not open to the public. And the Katy house is not the only American property the records hold in the Shada name.
