Geneva's tax authority demands millions from Cameroonian billionaire Paul Fokam

Geneva's cantonal tax administration has opened a proceeding against Paul Kammogne Fokam, the Cameroonian banker who founded Afriland First Bank, and is demanding millions of francs on the grounds that he failed to declare his wealth during the ten years he was tax-resident in Switzerland, the Swiss investigative outlet Gotham City reported on Wednesday, Sept. 9.

Cameroonian press reporting that described the scale of Fokam's assets is what brought the matter to the attention of the Geneva authority, according to the report.

No court has ruled on the case and no finding of wrongdoing has been made against Fokam.

The dispute sits in a Swiss cantonal tax office rather than in Yaoundé because Afriland First Group, the holding company at the top of Fokam's banking network, is registered in Geneva. Fokam has chaired its board since 2008.

Who Paul Fokam is

Fokam, 78, was born in Mboukué, in the town of Baham in western Cameroon, in July 1948. He worked as a deputy branch manager at Cameroon Bank from 1976 to 1979, studied economics and management at CNAM in Paris and took a doctorate in management sciences at the University of Bordeaux in 1989.

He founded the Caisse Commune d'Épargne et d'Investissement, known as CCEI Bank, in Cameroon in the mid-1980s. The lender was renamed Afriland First Bank in 2002 and grew into the largest African-owned commercial bank in Central Africa, with total assets crossing 2.032 trillion CFA francs, about $3.6 billion, at the end of 2024. The group operates in nine African countries and keeps representative offices in France and China.

His other ventures include SAAR in insurance, SAPI in property, AFREDIT in publishing and Voxafrica, a pan-African television channel he launched in London in 2006. He built the MC² network of community-managed savings and credit institutions across rural Cameroon, and endowed the PKFokam Institute along with an annual science and technology prize bearing his name. Guinea appointed him chairman of its national investment bank in 2020.

The political dimension

Gotham City sets the tax case against Fokam's public standing at home, noting that he presents himself in Cameroon as an authority on poverty reduction, and that his name has circulated as a possible successor to President Paul Biya.

That speculation has a live context. Biya, 93, has been president since 1982 and remains in office. He has designated no successor, the vice presidency created earlier this year is still vacant, and he spent 73 consecutive days abroad this year, mostly at the InterContinental in Geneva, before returning to Cameroon on Aug. 20. Names raised in succession discussions have included his eldest son Franck Biya and figures inside the ruling establishment.

A Swiss tax proceeding over undeclared wealth is an awkward development for anyone positioning themselves in that conversation, and particularly for a businessman whose public profile rests on the argument that Africa can finance its own development from African savings. That argument is the foundation of the MC² network and of the case Fokam has made for four decades about African-owned banking.

A second front for Afriland

The Geneva case adds to an existing dispute in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Fokam's group says it was expropriated.

Afriland First Group held 95.6 percent of Afriland First Bank RDC before July 2021, when, according to the group, the Congolese government and central bank removed shareholders, expelled the board chairman from the country and dismantled the board. The Central Bank of Congo assessed the bank's recapitalisation requirement at $90 million in March 2022. Afriland disputed both the figure and the process and made its participation conditional on an independent audit, which the regulator declined.

Afriland First Group and several other claimants, Fokam among them personally, filed at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, the World Bank's arbitration body, in August 2023. The tribunal rejected a jurisdictional objection from the DRC in July. The Congolese bank now carries negative equity of $116.9 million and is approaching insolvency.

The group left Equatorial Guinea in 2021 after a dispute with the government there over payment for its assets, having held roughly 70 percent of that country's banking market through CCEI Bank Guinée Equatoriale for two decades.

Expansion has continued

None of it has slowed the group's growth elsewhere. Afriland registered Afriland First Holding in Lomé as its investment arm, launched a securities firm called Africa Diamond Invest in Togo in June, capitalised at 1 billion CFA francs, and moved into Islamic finance and sukuk advisory across West Africa the same month. It opened in the Central African Republic in July.

Neither Fokam nor Afriland First Group had commented publicly on the Geneva proceeding as of Thursday, Sept. 10. Billionaires.Africa has approached the group.