Nigerian billionaire Muhammadu Indimi joins court fight against his twin daughters over $43.5 million

Muhammadu Indimi has applied to be joined personally in the appeal against a court judgment that ordered his oil company to pay his twin daughters $43.51 million, ThisDay reported.

Oriental Energy Resources has already appealed the February ruling, arguing that the share transfers at the centre of the case were voluntary and that relevant payments had been made under family arrangements. Indimi’s application would make him a party in his own right, alongside the company he founded.

The move reportedly caught Ameena and Zara Indimi off guard. Sources cited by the newspaper said the billionaire believes his direct presence in court could soften the adversarial tone the litigation has taken, and that his daughters’ respect for him might change the atmosphere of the proceedings. Neither Indimi nor his representatives have commented publicly.

The judgment he is contesting was delivered on February 25 by Justice Nkeonye Maha at the Federal High Court, which found that the twins were entitled to dividends withheld from them.

Their case turned on a shareholding they say was cut without their consent. Both sisters once sat on Oriental Energy’s board and held five percent of the company each, a combined ten percent. They told the court those holdings were reduced to roughly 0.6 percent each, which left them excluded from a dividend distribution of about $435.1 million declared in 2016. Ten percent of that pool is $43.51 million, the sum the court awarded.

Oriental Energy disputed that account throughout. The company told the Federal High Court that Indimi had bought out his children’s stakes for $10 million, and that they therefore had no grounds to claim a further $43.5 million. Earlier in February, Indimi’s eldest son filed an affidavit against his two sisters.

The company Indimi built is one of the more significant privately held businesses in Nigerian oil.

He founded Oriental Energy Resources in 1990 as an exploration and production company, and it holds offshore assets in the Niger Delta, the wetland region in southern Nigeria where almost all of the country’s crude is produced. Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil producer, and Oriental is among the most prominent indigenous operators in a sector long dominated by international majors.

Indimi was born in Maiduguri, in Nigeria’s northeast, and built his fortune from that company. He is a well-known philanthropist, having funded educational and religious institutions across northern Nigeria, and his family has married into political prominence.

The case has drawn attention beyond the sum involved because of what it exposes. Privately held Nigerian oil companies disclose almost nothing about their ownership or their finances, and the litigation has forced into open court the kind of shareholding arrangements that normally never leave the family.

It has also raised a governance question that recurs in family businesses across the continent. Where shares are allocated informally between relatives and later adjusted, and where payments pass between family members without documentation specifying what they settle, the corporate record and the family understanding can diverge sharply. Oriental Energy’s defence rests on that divergence, arguing that money already paid extinguished the daughters’ claim. The court did not accept it.

What happens next depends on the appeal, and on whether Indimi’s application to be joined is granted. Neither the timetable for the appeal nor the status of that application has been made public.
(Billionaires Africa)