Oil tycoon Samuel Dossou-Aworet's Seplat stake has surged to $670 million and keeps climbing

The stake that veteran oil dealmaker Samuel Dossou-Aworet holds in Seplat Energy Plc through his Petrolin Group is now worth $670 million, up approximately $300 million from the figure recorded when Billionaires.Africa published its ranking of the 30 richest investors on the Nigerian Exchange Group earlier this year, as the company's share price continues a remarkable run that has made it the most dramatically re-rated stock on the bourse in 2026.

Petrolin Group, the Geneva-headquartered energy conglomerate that Dossou-Aworet founded in London in 1992, owns 81,015,319 ordinary shares in Seplat Energy, representing a 13.5 percent stake. At the current Nigerian Exchange share price and an exchange rate of N1,361 to the dollar, those shares are worth $670 million.

Seplat Energy is a Nigerian-focused independent oil and gas producer with operations across the Niger Delta and a growing midstream infrastructure business. The company reported a 144 percent jump in revenue to $2.73 billion for the full year 2025 and adjusted EBITDA of $1.28 billion, up 137 percent. It became the first stock in the 65-year history of the Nigerian Exchange to close above N10,000 per share in April 2026, a milestone it has since extended. FTSE Russell's announcement that Nigeria would be reclassified from unclassified to Frontier Market status, effective September 2026, has added a structural tailwind as international institutional investors position ahead of the index-related capital inflows expected to follow.

Dossou-Aworet's Seplat holding is one of two major Nigerian Exchange positions he holds. In September 2025, Petrolin Ocean Limited, a separate Petrolin vehicle, acquired 173.79 million additional shares in Aradel Energy at an average price of N555 per share, spending approximately N96.45 billion ($64.4 million) and lifting his Aradel stake to 13.77 percent. At Aradel's trading price of N560 at the time of acquisition, his holding was valued at approximately $199.9 million. His two largest Nigerian Exchange positions are now collectively worth approximately $870 million.

Dossou-Aworet, who was born in Porto-Novo, Benin on November 5, 1944, and is now 81 years old, trained as a petroleum engineer at the Ecole Centrale de Marseille and the French Institute of Petroleum. He served as Chairman of the OPEC Board of Governors and General Manager of Hydrocarbons in Gabon before establishing Petrolin. Under his leadership, Petrolin has operated as a bridge between international oil majors and African national oil companies, providing strategic advisory, commercial structuring and equity participation across transactions in Nigeria, Gabon, Congo, Côte d'Ivoire and other African jurisdictions.

His most consequential recent transaction came earlier in 2025, when Petrolin Group was part of the Renaissance consortium that completed a $2.4 billion acquisition of Shell's onshore oil business in Nigeria, partnering with Waltersmith Group, ND Western, First E&P and Aradel Energy. The deal transferred Shell's 30 percent operating interest in the Shell Petroleum Development Company joint venture, covering 19 oil mining leases in the Niger Delta, to an indigenous consortium in one of the largest such transactions in Nigerian petroleum history.

Dossou-Aworet also chairs ND Western, serves as President of the Africa Business Roundtable, which was established by the African Development Bank in 1990, and holds France's Légion d'Honneur. He is among the most influential figures in African petroleum deal-making and one of its least publicly visible.