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A Nigerian Federal High Court has ordered Oriental Energy, the oil company founded by businessman Muhammadu Indimi, to pay his twin daughters $43.51 million in a dispute over dividends that has spilled from the boardroom into open court and exposed tensions inside one of the country’s wealthiest families.
The ruling, reported by The Africa Report, handed a major win to the sisters, Ameena and Zara Indimi, after a legal fight centered on whether they were unfairly cut out of a large dividend pool linked to Oriental Energy’s earnings from its offshore oil assets.
At the heart of the case is a long running argument over ownership and entitlements. The twins have argued they were entitled to a combined 10% stake and therefore a share of dividends tied to about $435.1 million the company was said to have declared. They alleged their individual holdings were reduced sharply, leaving them with far less than they believed they owned, and that the changes happened in a way that deprived them of their rightful payout.
Oriental Energy is a private Nigerian exploration and production firm with key offshore interests in the Niger Delta. Built over decades, it has been a cornerstone of Indimi’s business profile and one of the better known privately held players in Nigeria’s upstream industry, operating in a sector where ownership structures often sit behind closed doors and financial details are rarely disclosed publicly.
Indimi, an oil magnate with significant interests across energy and finance, is also a public figure whose wealth and influence place him among the country’s most prominent businessmen. That profile has helped pull the family dispute into the public eye, with the amounts involved and the identities of the parties turning what might have been a private inheritance quarrel into a national talking point.
The court order adds urgency to a feud that has been closely watched in Nigeria, partly because of the sums involved and partly because it raises a familiar question in family owned enterprises: what happens when succession planning, governance and share transfers are contested by the heirs.
Public reporting in recent years has suggested the dispute has widened beyond the twins, with disagreements inside the wider Indimi family over who controls which holdings and whether earlier payments made to some relatives should be treated as gifts, buyouts or settlement funds that extinguished dividend rights. In the background sits a deeper tension that surfaces repeatedly in wealthy families, where corporate paperwork and family expectations do not always line up.
Details of the latest judgment, including the precise method used to arrive at the $43.51 million figure and the compliance timetable, were not laid out fully in the reporting available. Still, the order itself signals the court found merit in the daughters’ claim that money was owed, a finding that could reshape leverage in any negotiations that follow.
The ruling also lands at a time when Nigerian courts are increasingly being asked to untangle high value corporate disputes involving private firms that disclose little publicly. These cases often turn on questions of access to company information, the validity of internal resolutions, and whether shareholders were properly consulted before major decisions were taken.
Any appeal, enforcement fight or settlement could take months, and the next phase may determine whether the judgment becomes cash in hand or another chapter in a legal saga already defined by delayed resolution and deepening family lines.
Nigeria’s oil sector rarely lacks drama, but this one is unusually personal, and the court’s order has pushed it into a new, more consequential stage.
