5 Nigerian billionaires hold a quarter of Aradel Holdings, worth $1.1 billion

Five individuals hold 24.25 percent of Aradel Holdings between them, a position worth about $1.1 billion at the current share price.

Aradel closed at 1,450 naira, valuing the company at 6.3 trillion naira, roughly $4.53 billion at 1,390 naira to the dollar. The stock has more than doubled since June, when it traded at 679 naira.

What makes the register unusual is that these are people rather than institutions. Most large Nigerian listed companies are controlled either by a single founder, as Dangote Cement is by Aliko Dangote, or by foreign parents and pension funds. Aradel has five substantial personal holdings and no controlling shareholder among them.

The company they own

Aradel was incorporated on March 25, 1992 as the Midas Drilling Fund, described at the time as Nigeria's first integrated oil and gas investment company.

The founding chairman was the late Chief Godwin Aret Adams, a former group managing director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. He and a group of professionals set it up on a specific premise, which was that ordinary Nigerians should be able to invest in and benefit from the oil sector rather than watching foreign majors extract it.

It became Niger Delta Exploration and Production in November 1996.

The transaction that made it came in 2000, when the company acquired beneficial interests in the Ogbele marginal field in Rivers State. That deal was Nigeria's first ever marginal field farm-out agreement, negotiated between the NNPC and Chevron joint venture and the company's upstream arm, and it opened a route by which indigenous operators could take on fields the majors considered too small.

Oil production started at Ogbele in November 2005.

The company then built downstream. It commissioned Nigeria's first mini refinery at Ogbele in 2010, initially processing 1,000 barrels a day and since expanded to an 11,000-barrel three-train modular plant producing automotive gas oil, kerosene, marine diesel, high-pour fuel oil and naphtha. A 100 million standard cubic feet per day gas processing plant followed in 2012, eliminating routine flaring at the field and making Aradel the first Nigerian independent to deliver non-joint-venture gas to the Bonny liquefied natural gas system.

The company assumed its current name in May 2023 and listed on the Nigerian Exchange in October 2024.

Samuel Dossou-Aworet, 12.26 percent

The largest individual holder is not Nigerian.

Dossou-Aworet holds a stake worth about 772 billion naira, or $556 million, through his Petrolin group. He was born in Porto-Novo in Benin, trained as an engineer in France, and spent his early career inside the machinery of African oil rather than in business. He advised Gabon's minister of mines, energy and petroleum from 1974, became the country's Director General of Hydrocarbons in 1978 and held the post until 1991, and chaired the OPEC Board of Governors across two terms.

He founded Petrolin in London in 1992 as a crude trading and refinery processing business, then co-founded the pan-African explorer Energy Africa in 1994 and sold it to Tullow Oil for $500 million a decade later. He remains Tullow's largest shareholder.

Petrolin took its position in Aradel in 2005. It is also a counterparty to the company, having agreed in January to sell its 40 percent holding in ND Western to Aradel, a transaction that would consolidate Aradel's position in the Renaissance consortium that bought Shell's onshore Nigerian business for $2.4 billion.

Fola Adeola, 5.52 percent

Adeola's stake is worth about $250 million, and he built the money that bought it by starting a bank in his thirties.

Born Tajudeen Afolabi Adeola in Lagos in January 1954, he was one of 17 children of a bank clerk, and hawked goods as a boy to help support the household. He took a diploma in accounting at Yaba College of Technology in 1975 and qualified as a chartered accountant in 1980 after training with Deloitte, Haskins and Sells and D.O. Dafinone.

He and his friend Tayo Aderinokun opened a barbershop in Ikoyi in 1986, because residents were travelling to the mainland for haircuts. Both were then working at Continental Merchant Bank. On Aug. 2, 1990 the pair received banking licence number 58, signed by finance minister Olu Falae, for Guaranty Trust Bank.

Adeola ran GTBank as managing director and chief executive from its founding until July 2002, when he retired after twelve years and handed to Aderinokun. The bank listed in 1996 and expanded into The Gambia, Sierra Leone and beyond, and is now among the most profitable in Nigeria.

He founded the FATE Foundation in 2000, after watching more than 2,000 applicants compete for a handful of vacancies at his own bank, and has since chaired UTC, ARM, Lotus Capital, Eterna Oil, CardinalStone Partners, Credit Registry Services and Main One Cable, which laid a 14,000-kilometre submarine cable from Portugal to Lagos in 2010. He served as the first chairman of Nigeria's National Pension Commission and stood as vice-presidential candidate alongside Nuhu Ribadu in 2011.

Ladi Jadesimi, 5.27 percent

Jadesimi holds his stake through Badagry Creek FZE, worth about $239 million.

He built the company from its founding in 1992 and chaired it for more than three decades, taking it from a drilling fund with no assets to an integrated producer with its own refinery and gas plant. He stepped down in the first half of 2025 under statutory tenure limits and kept his entire shareholding. He is 81.

Olusola Adeeyo, 0.93 percent

Adeeyo's stake is worth about $42 million, and he is the most connected banker on the register.

He took his undergraduate degree at the State University of New York at Albany and a graduate degree at Northeastern University, then began his career in the corporate banking department of Nigerian International Bank, now Citibank Nigeria, moving into its reconstituted treasury and foreign exchange unit.

He joined Investment Banking and Trust Company in 1989 as director and group head of treasury, and was part of the founding management and owner group that built IBTC into what is now Stanbic IBTC Bank. He left in 1991 to set up Asset and Investment Limited, a financial advisory business he ran as chief executive, arranging debt for Nigerian state governments and trading companies.

He co-founded the Protea Hotel Oakwood Park in Lekki, part of the South African chain now owned by Marriott, and founded Astral Waters, among the first bottled water businesses licensed by Nigeria's food and drug regulator, which he chairs. He also chairs Viathan Engineering, an independent power business.

His board record runs across the Nigerian financial system. He chaired AXA Mansard Insurance until February 2023, sat on the Central Securities Clearing System, and became a non-executive director of FBN Holdings, now FirstHoldCo, in March 2024, in the first round of appointments after Femi Otedola took the chairmanship. He has been an independent non-executive director of Ardova since 2019 and joined the Aradel board on July 24, 2025.

Adegbite Falade, 0.26 percent

Falade runs the company as chief executive and holds a stake worth about $12 million, the smallest of the five and the only one held by a sitting executive.