EXCLUSIVE: Stanbic IBTC Holdings Chief Executive Adimohanma Chukwuma Nwokocha Took Two Home Loans of N1.36 Billion From the Group’s Own Bank Seven Weeks After Taking Office and Holds Not One Share in the Company He Runs

Seven weeks. That is all the time Adimohanma Chukwuma Nwokocha needed at the top of Stanbic IBTC Holdings Plc before the group's own bank handed him two home loans with approved limits of N1,362,500,000. Nwokocha became the substantive Chief Executive of the Holdings on 2 October 2025. On 25 November 2025, Stanbic IBTC Bank, the flagship subsidiary beneath him, granted him the two facilities, both of them home loans under the staff scheme, both of them secured by legal mortgage over property, and both of them running to 20 November 2032.

The first loan is the mountain. Its approved limit is N1,262,500,000, priced at 20 per cent. Documents in possession of SecretsReporters show that by 31 December 2025, five weeks after the money was granted, the balance on that single facility stood at N1,270,771,412.27, a figure already above the approved limit the bank set for its own group chief executive, the excess carried on accrued interest. The loan is marked performing. It is secured. It is also, on the bank's own numbers, bigger than the ceiling that was approved for it.

The second loan walked in beside it on the same day, 25 November 2025: a further home loan with an approved limit of N100,000,000, priced at 10 per cent, half the rate of the first, likewise secured by legal mortgage and likewise expiring on 20 November 2032. Its balance at 31 December 2025 stood at N99,126,255.71. Two home loans, one borrower, one day, one bank, and the borrower is the man at the very top of the group that owns the bank.

Six months on, the mountain had barely moved. By 30 June 2026 the first facility still stood at N1,269,900,000 and the second at N91,936,016, a combined N1,361,836,016 owed by the group chief executive to the group's bank on two home loans taken out before he had spent two months in the office. The facilities are disclosed, they are performing, and no document suggests a default. What the documents establish is simpler and harder: the chief executive's single biggest financial relationship is with the institution he was appointed to lead.

Against those billions in borrowing stands his ownership of the company: nothing. The register of directors' shareholding in Stanbic IBTC Holdings carries his colleagues, Ballama Manu with 637,524 shares and Adekunle Adedeji with 143,181 shares among the holders. Nwokocha's name is not there. He holds not one share in the group he runs. The man who owes its bank N1.36 billion owns no part of it.

The pattern runs down the house. At the bank he borrowed from, the Chief Executive, Oluwole Adelaja Adeniyi, equally holds no share in the institution, a position SecretsReporters findings have already placed on record alongside the six personal facilities standing in Adeniyi's own name, among them a dollar card line of $28,798,600 with $18,074,490.94 drawn. At Stanbic IBTC, the two men at the summit own nothing of the group and owe it heavily, one in dollars, the other in naira, each facility granted by the institution beneath its borrower's own authority.

Nwokocha arrived with three decades of banking behind him, a chartered accountant who had run Standard Bank's Mozambican subsidiary as chief executive and later served as a regional managing director at Access Bank, overseeing Angola, Botswana, Mozambique and Zambia. He succeeded Adekunle Adedeji, who had held the Holdings in an acting capacity, and his appointment took effect on 2 October 2025 with every regulatory approval in place. Seven weeks later, on a single November day, the group's bank approved N1,362,500,000 in home loans in his name, and both facilities stand on the books today, the larger of them still above the limit that was set for it, with repayment stretching to 20 November 2032.

Before publication, SecretsReporters put its findings to Stanbic IBTC, asking the bank to confirm the two facilities, their rates, balances and security, and to explain how the first facility came to stand above its approved limit. The bank answered: "The accurate information on this matter is as factually reported in our Annual Report. We have nothing further to add beyond the disclosures contained in that report." It added that it trusted any report published would accurately reflect the facts, and that it reserved all its rights in respect of any publication containing information that is inaccurate, misleading, or otherwise not factually correct.

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