By A London divorce court has held that the £1.6 million loan with which billionaire hotelier Olusegun Samuel Awolowo claimed the equity in his £2 million London home had been wiped out does not exist, that the Nigerian court judgment behind the loan was registered in England through a course of events manipulated by the hotelier and his brother to defeat his wife’s claim, and that his wife Fisayo Olaoluwa Awolowo takes £1,750,000 of what the marriage held in England while he is left with about £190,000.
The Olusegun Samuel Awolowo in these judgments is the hotelier behind De Skyline Hotel Limited of Sango-Ota in Ogun State. He is not the late Olusegun Awolowo, the former chief executive of the Nigerian Export Promotion Council and grandson of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, and no judgment in the case connects him to that family.
Awolowo married Fisayo on 24 December 2004 and the couple had four children. The family moved to England in 2009, and in December 2009 he bought the family home at 49 Sherwood Road in Hendon, London, for £1.35 million, mortgage-free and in his sole name. A second London property followed in July 2010 at £816,500. The couple separated in February 2015, a Nigerian court granted a decree nisi on 7 September 2018, and on 17 October 2018 the English court gave Fisayo leave to claim financial relief in England after the foreign divorce, under Part III of the Matrimonial and Family Proceedings Act 1984.
His own paper trail showed what the marriage stood on. A Statement of Property Owned by Mr Segun Awolowo, signed by him in 2007 in support of the family’s United Kingdom visa application, listed five Nigerian properties, including a Lagos airport hotel, valued together at N1.255 billion. The 2018 accounts of De Skyline in Nigeria showed tangible assets of N2,155,942,000.
Against his wife’s claim, Awolowo produced the loan. He asserted that the equity in the Hendon home had been extinguished by a debt of £1.6 million owed to Linkserve Ventures Transnational Limited, his brother’s company. A Nigerian judgment for Linkserve, delivered on 27 March 2019, was registered in England on 30 April 2019, and a charging order over the home was made final on 28 November 2022. In September 2023 a judge accepted the loan as genuine, and on that footing the wife’s claim was all but dead.
The Court of Appeal tore that footing away on 16 May 2025 in Awolowo v Awolowo and Another, citation [2025] EWCA Civ 641, allowing the wife’s appeal and ordering a rehearing. At the rehearing, in a judgment handed down in December 2025 under citation [2025] EWHC 3346 (Fam), Mr Justice Peel held that no debt of £1.6 million, or any part of it, exists. The judge set aside the registration of the Nigerian judgment as contrary to public policy, and set aside the charge over the home under section 23 of the Matrimonial and Family Proceedings Act 1984 as a disposition intended to defeat the wife’s claim. The judgment recorded that the entire course of events had been manipulated by the husband with his brother’s complicity, that the wife was patently honest, and that the husband was belligerent and unhelpful.
Through all of it, the hotelier paid none of the interim maintenance of £1,000 a month ordered against him in August 2019, and he produced no bank statements or accounts to the court, which found that he likely holds undisclosed assets in Nigeria.
The final judgment, citation [2026] EWFC 31, handed down on 16 February 2026, ordered the Hendon home, valued at £2 million, to be sold, and gave Fisayo Awolowo £1,750,000 in all: £649,528 towards her debts, principally £607,174 of unpaid legal fees, £72,000 of the maintenance arrears he never paid, £1,000,000 for housing, and £28,800 of capitalised child maintenance for the children, the youngest of whom requires round-the-clock care. What remains for the hotelier from the English assets is about £190,000, against his wife’s share of about 90 percent of the home’s equity.
What the London courts have left behind is the hotelier’s own arithmetic turned against him. To bring his family into England he signed a statement valuing his Nigerian properties at N1.255 billion, yet when his wife came before the court for her share he swore the Hendon house was already consumed by a debt to his brother’s company. Three judgments on, that debt is held never to have existed, the Nigerian judgment that carried it into England is struck out, and the house he bought outright for £1.35 million is to be sold so that £1,750,000 reaches the wife who waited through seven years of maintenance orders he never honoured.
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