By On 5 January 2026, the Nigerian Exchange admitted 2,575,851,543 new FirstHoldCo ordinary shares to its Daily Official List, N83.7 billion of fresh capital at N32.50 a share, the first tranche of the banking group’s private placement. The listing named no subscriber. Ten applications took the whole tranche between them, and not one of the ten has ever been identified in any filing.
SecretsReporters inspection of the group’s own registers tells the part of the story the listing left out. FirstHoldCo’s third-quarter statements put Calvados Global Services Limited, the investment vehicle of the group’s chairman, Femi Otedola, at 3,491,125,586 shares on 30 September 2025. The audited accounts for the full year put the same vehicle at 4,803,968,241 shares on 31 December 2025. In one quarter, Calvados grew by 1,312,842,655 shares.
Against that growth, the whole of the disclosure the market received fits inside two notices. On 18 December 2025, Calvados bought 369,986,122 shares at N40.06, a purchase FirstHoldCo notified to the Exchange in the chairman’s name. On 19 December 2025, it bought 9,779,610 more at N46.36, notified the same way. The two notices account for 379,765,732 shares between them.
The register and the notices do not meet. Standing in Calvados’s name at the year end are 933,076,923 shares with no insider dealing notice, no announcement and no filing of any kind behind them. Priced at the N32.50 the placement charged, they are worth N30.3 billion. They are 36.2 per cent of the entire first tranche the Exchange listed in January.
Otedola himself bought nothing in his own name in that quarter. His direct holding reads 3,251,346,245 shares in the third-quarter statements and exactly the same number in the audited annual accounts. Every share of the quarter’s accumulation sits inside Calvados.
The placement’s own calendar runs through the same weeks. The nine-month results had promised that the first phase of the raise would conclude in November 2025. The offer that followed put 3,276,923,077 shares on the table at the placement price and drew 78.61 per cent subscription. The Securities and Exchange Commission approved the basis of allotment in December 2025, and the new shares reached the Exchange list on 5 January 2026.
Two things belong on the record, stated plainly. No document published by FirstHoldCo, the Exchange or the Commission names Calvados as an allottee of the first tranche. The basis of allotment schedule, the one document that names every subscriber and what each subscriber received, has never been made public. What exists is the arithmetic of the group’s own registers, and the arithmetic holds when it is tested the only way it can be. Run forward into 2026, the same method takes Calvados’s audited year-end position, adds the notified purchase of 549,535,653 shares of 13 May 2026 and the 672.9 million shares allotted under the second tranche, and lands within 42,000 shares of the 6,026,445,792 the half-year statements record for the vehicle.
The disclosure rules leave a space of exactly this size. Dealings by insiders and companies connected to them must be notified to the Exchange, as the two December purchases were. Beyond that, Rule 17.13 of the Exchange’s Issuers’ Rules, which covers changes in beneficial ownership, and section 120 of the Companies and Allied Matters Act 2020, which covers substantial shareholders in a public company, both set their notification trigger at 5 per cent of a company’s voting shares. The unexplained holding is 2.1 per cent of FirstHoldCo’s enlarged capital. It crossed no threshold, it triggered no notice, and none was filed for it.
The balance of the tranche sits in the same silence. 1,642,774,620 shares, 63.8 per cent of the allotment, stand in the names of subscribers no filing identifies. The registers published to the market record who holds FirstHoldCo’s shares today. The document that records who subscribed the first tranche, and what each of the ten applications received, has never been published.
