By The merger that produced ProvidusUnity Bank Limited was advised, on both sides of the table, by firms that held shares in the banks they were advising. SecretsReporters scrutiny of the transaction documents and the two banks’ registers shows Lighthouse Capital Limited advising Unity Bank Plc while holding 9.01 per cent of Unity Bank’s shares, and Planet Capital Limited, described in the documents as a significant shareholder of Providus Bank Limited, also advising Unity. On the other side, PAC Capital Limited, described as related to Unity, advised Providus, and Vetiva advised Providus while sitting as a subsidiary of a significant Providus shareholder. The Supreme Court sanctioned the merger on 1 June 2026. No court or regulator has pronounced on the adviser appointments, and no publication has assembled the shareholdings and the advisory roles into a single record until now.
The placement that stands behind the enlarged bank carries the second silence. Providus Bank placed 9,375,000,000 ordinary shares at N8.00 per share in a private placement that raised N75 billion and closed in March 2026, arranged by Vetiva Capital Management, Cordros Capital and PAC Capital Limited. The placement’s size, price and arrangers were reported at the time. The subscribers were not. No basis of allotment naming who took the shares has been found on the public record, and two of the three arrangers sit inside the same related party network as the merger advisers. Seventy five billion naira entered a licensed bank’s capital, and the public record does not name a single human being or institution that supplied it.
Parts of the register beneath the merger are already public, and they are stated here as context. Unity Bank’s register of members, reported in 2025, carried the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria at 34.22 per cent, PanAfrican Capital Nominee at 12.67 per cent and Lighthouse Capital Limited at 9.01 per cent. The nominee entry names no client. PanAfrican Capital Nominee held 1,480,614,483 Unity shares for a beneficiary that no filing in the public domain identifies, while PAC Capital, of the same PanAfrican group, advised the other bank in the merger.
The Providus side of the register carries entries no publication has reported. Rosa Mystica Energy FZE holds about 8 per cent of the bank. A further block of between 7.4 and 7.9 per cent stands under a name the filings render in two forms, Maria Katrina in some records and Atrina in others. The spelling differs across the records, and the identity behind the block is unresolved on the public record. Between the nominee block on the Unity side, the free zone company and the name that changes its spelling from filing to filing, a substantial part of the enlarged bank’s ownership cannot be traced to a named person from anything the public can read.
The law governing this ground is not silent. The Central Bank of Nigeria’s Corporate Governance Guidelines require related party transactions by banks to be disclosed, conducted at arm’s length and kept clear of the influence of the interested parties, and the Guidelines provide monetary penalties and administrative sanctions against the bank and the individuals involved, including suspension of a responsible director for six months in the first instance and possible removal on a repeat. Company law requires a director to declare any interest in a transaction before the board. Section 7 of the Banks and Other Financial Institutions Act 2020 provides that a significant shareholding moved without the prior written consent of the Governor of the Central Bank is void, and punishes the breach with a fine of not less than N20 million plus N500,000 for each day the failure continues. Under the Companies and Allied Matters Act 2020, a person holding 5 per cent or more of a company’s shares is a person with significant control whose identity must be disclosed.
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission holds the statutory mandate for the pattern the record presents. Sections 6 and 7 of the EFCC Act empower the Commission to investigate financial crimes, identify the persons involved and trace and freeze suspicious funds, and the money laundering law requires the true owners of funds placed inside the financial system to be known and verified. Nothing in the public record shows that the Commission, the Central Bank or the Securities and Exchange Commission has examined the adviser appointments, named the subscribers of the placement, or identified the client behind the nominee block. The merger stands sanctioned and complete. The disclosures the law requires around it remain, on everything the public can read, unmade.
