Billionaire Femi Otedola says he sold his Geregu Power stake to buy $100 million worth of Dangote Refinery shares

Femi Otedola has been to the Dangote Petroleum Refinery 25 times. On Wednesday he finally said publicly what those visits have been building toward: he sold his stake in Geregu Power Plc to free up capital for a $100 million investment in the refinery's planned initial public offering.

Otedola made the disclosure during a visit to the 650,000-barrel-per-day refinery complex in Ibeju-Lekki, Lagos, by the board and management of FirstHoldCo, the holding company he chairs as the parent of First Bank of Nigeria. Speaking at the site alongside Aliko Dangote, he appealed directly to Africa's richest man to allocate him shares worth $100 million in the private placement that will precede the IPO. "On a personal note, I've appealed to him. I have been here with him 25 times. So, my compensation is that he is going to allocate to me shares worth $100 million in the private placement. That is one of the reasons I sold my stake in Geregu plant to come and invest my proceeds in the IPO of the Dangote Refinery," he said.

The statement resolves a question that had been circulating in Nigerian financial markets since Otedola divested his majority stake in Geregu Power in December 2025, a transaction estimated at $750 million. He never publicly explained what he intended to do with the proceeds. Now he has.

Dangote responded on the spot, assuring Otedola and the broader audience that the IPO would be inclusive. "We want ordinary Africans to participate in the value being created. What companies like Amazon and Apple achieved globally in terms of wealth creation is what we seek to replicate in Africa," he said. He confirmed that investor demand for the refinery had already climbed to nearly $2 billion, a figure that underscores the appetite building around what is expected to become the largest single equity offering in African capital markets history.

The planned IPO targets a valuation of between $40 billion and $50 billion for the refinery business and would involve the sale of between 5 and 10 percent of Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals FZE across multiple African exchanges including Nigeria's main market. The offering is being prepared with JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Standard Bank as advisers on a parallel secondary listing of Dangote Cement on the London Stock Exchange, targeted for September 2026.

Otedola's $100 million commitment, if allocated as requested, would represent one of the largest single declared personal investments in the offering. It also represents a notable alignment between the two biggest names in Nigerian business. Dangote, the industrialist who built the refinery over more than a decade at a cost exceeding $19 billion, and Otedola, the investor and banker who built and sold Forte Oil, owned and sold Geregu Power, and now chairs FirstHoldCo through its recapitalisation, are now formally on the same side of the same trade.

The visit carried additional messaging beyond the refinery investment. Otedola disclosed that FirstHoldCo's board has set a target of becoming one of the largest banks in Sub-Saharan Africa and West Africa within the next five years. "The First HoldCo institution has decided, the board and the members have decided, that First HoldCo has to be one of the biggest, largest banks in Sub-Saharan Africa and West Africa within the next five years," he said. That ambition, combined with the bank's record Q1 2026 profit of N321.1 billion and its drive toward a N1 trillion paid-up capital base, positions the refinery investment not as a departure from the banking strategy but as a parallel move by its chairman acting in a personal capacity.

Otedola praised Dangote in terms rarely used between two men of comparable stature. "He is a genius and one of the greatest men to emerge from Africa. What he has achieved is helping to liberate the continent from economic dependency and import reliance," he said. He accompanied Dangote on visits to commission cement plants across six African countries. That relationship, built over decades, now has a $100 million data point attached to it.

The refinery, which reached above-nameplate capacity of 661,000 barrels per day earlier this year, currently supplies close to 80 percent of Nigeria's domestic petrol demand and has cut the country's monthly fuel import bill from billions of dollars to near zero. It exports surplus refined products across West Africa and beyond. Dangote is simultaneously fighting a lawsuit at the Federal High Court in Lagos seeking to cancel fresh import licences granted by the regulator to six petroleum marketers, arguing the approvals violate an existing court order and the commercial logic of a market the refinery is already supplying at scale.

Whether or not Otedola gets his $100 million allocation, his public declaration that the Geregu sale proceeds are earmarked for the refinery sends a signal that will be noted by every institutional investor sitting on the fence about the IPO.