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Samuel Dossou-Aworet spent 13 years directing Gabon's oil sector on behalf of a government that was not his own. He was born in Porto-Novo, Benin in 1944. Gabon eventually gave him honorary citizenship. He had earned it.
By the time he left government in 1991, he had served as Gabon's Director General of Hydrocarbons, chaired the OPEC Board of Governors, represented Gabon at the African Petroleum Producers Association and served as a governor of the OPEC Special Fund. He had spent nearly two decades inside the architecture of African oil. He understood who held the assets, who held the access and where the gaps were. In 1992, he decided to exploit all three.
The engineer who became a trader
Dossou-Aworet trained as a petroleum engineer at the Ecole Centrale de Marseille, graduating in petrochemistry and industrial organic synthesis in 1971, before completing a second qualification at the French Institute of Petroleum in 1972. His early career began in consulting, working with Sema Metra International in Paris in 1973 and 1974. Government came next, then private enterprise.
He founded Petrolin in London in 1992. The first phase was straightforward: consulting, then trading. "I started as a consultant, later on beginning trading, before embarking on exploration activities to find our own oil," he once said. The company moved its headquarters to Geneva in 1993 and grew from there.
The deals that built the empire
Two years after founding Petrolin, Dossou-Aworet flew to South Africa. Nelson Mandela had just been elected president and the country was opening. He approached Engen Petroleum, formerly Mobil's South African operation, with a proposition: create the first pan-African exploration company listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. The result was Energy Africa. It was a landmark move, bringing African capital and African leadership into upstream exploration across the continent at a moment when the sector was still largely foreign-controlled.
Energy Africa ran for a decade before Tullow Oil acquired it in 2004 for a price that doubled the British company's African footprint overnight. Dossou-Aworet had built something worth buying. He did not stop building.
In 2012, his Petrolin Trading led a joint venture that won an international tender for a 45% participating interest in Nigeria's Block OML 34, acquired from Shell, Total and Eni. The transaction created ND Western Limited, a new independent Nigerian oil and gas company, with Dossou-Aworet as chairman and principal shareholder. Nigeria had become his second home market.
Seplat and the billion-dollar position
His most valuable holding today is in Seplat Energy, Nigeria's largest listed oil and gas company by market capitalization. Dossou-Aworet has held approximately 13.87% of Seplat, roughly 81 million shares, since the company's early years following its 2009 founding by Ambrosie Bryant Orjiako and Austin Avuru. When Seplat became the first stock in Nigerian Exchange history to breach N10,000 per share in April 2026, his stake was valued at approximately N846.6 billion, equivalent to $587.8 million.
His combined positions across Seplat, Aradel Holdings and Tullow Oil were estimated at approximately $907 million in early April 2026, before Seplat's subsequent rally. That figure has since moved higher.
Earlier in 2024, Dossou-Aworet's Petrolin joined the Renaissance consortium alongside Waltersmith Group, ND Western, First E&P and Aradel Energy to acquire Shell's Nigerian onshore oil business in a $2.4 billion transaction. It was the largest private sector acquisition in Nigerian energy history.
Building beyond oil
His ambitions extend beyond hydrocarbons. Through the Backbone Project, Dossou-Aworet is developing an integrated infrastructure corridor in Benin covering rail, a petroleum and commercial port, dry ports and an international airport. His pan-African NGO, Fondation Espace Afrique, has operated since 1996 across humanitarian programs in Gabon, Benin and beyond. He has served as president of the Africa Business Roundtable, established by the African Development Bank in 1990.
He is an Officer of the Legion of Honor and a Grand Officer of the Equatorial Star. He is also, at 80, still making deals.
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