Nigerian tycoon Kola Karim lands $500 million from Qatar to double oil production

Kola Karim has secured a $500 million Islamic financing package arranged by Qatar Islamic Bank to fund a drilling programme meant to lift output from one of Nigeria's largest onshore oil blocks above 100,000 barrels a day by the end of 2027, The Africa Report said on Monday, Sept. 28.

The money goes into OML 30 in the Niger Delta, held by Shoreline Natural Resources, the upstream arm of Karim's group. He told the publication that the new drilling push is what gets the block past 100,000 barrels.

Islamic financing matters here beyond the number. A structure compliant with sharia cannot charge interest, so the lender takes a share of the asset or the revenue instead, which ties what the bank earns to whether the wells actually produce. Qatar Islamic Bank is the largest Islamic lender in Qatar, with roughly 43% of that sector and 11% of the country's banking market.

Shoreline has been chasing this number for years. It bought 45% of OML 30 from Shell in 2012 in a joint venture with Heritage Oil, and production has been reported at various points since at between 45,000 and 70,000 barrels a day, against a 100,000 target that has been restated more than once. The block owns and operates the Trans Forcados pipeline, which carries crude to the export terminal.

What has changed is where the money comes from. Shoreline put together a $530 million package in 2018 involving Vitol, Farallon Capital Management and four Nigerian banks. It has now gone to the Gulf, and in June it took a $200 million dual-tranche facility from Afreximbank, most of it supporting a $980 million oil field development at Hassi Bir Rekaiz in Algeria through Arkad, the Italian engineering contractor Shoreline majority-owns.

The group has been widening its map at the same time. Shoreline bought producing oil assets in the United States earlier this year, in what Karim described as raising the African flag in the heartland of the global oil industry.

Karim is a British national of Nigerian descent who runs Shoreline Energy International as group managing director and chief executive. The group spans energy, engineering, infrastructure, power, telecommunications and agriculture, and has built gas compression plants aimed at cutting flaring in the Niger Delta. He sits on the advisory board of Harvard's Centre for African Studies.

Neither Shoreline nor Qatar Islamic Bank has published the terms.