Nigerian fintech chief fined $250mn after holdings described as a ‘fiction’

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A US federal court has ordered a Nigerian businessman, who last year sought to buy the English football club Sheffield United, to pay more than $250mn in fines and barred him from serving as a director of a public company.

Last year, the US Securities and Exchange Commission had charged Dozy Mmobuosi and three of his companies, including two Nasdaq-listed enterprises, with fraud for inflating the “financial performance metrics of his companies and key operating subsidiaries to defraud investors worldwide”.

Judge Jesse M Furman, of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, has now entered a final judgment by default against Mmobuosi and his companies after the entrepreneur failed to make any representations in the civil complaint filed last December by the SEC.

The judge wrote that Mmobuosi and his companies, Tingo Group, Agri-Fintech Holdings and Tingo International Holdings, had “failed to answer, plead, or otherwise defend” themselves in the case.

Mmobuosi and his three US-based entities have been ordered to pay more than $250mn in fines after the SEC alleged that his empire was a “fiction”.

Tingo, a fintech group, claimed it had more than 9mn customers in Nigeria, most of whom were farmers, and that it had a food processing business.

The SEC said in last year’s complaint that the “purported assets, revenues, expenses, customers and suppliers” of Mmobuosi’s Tingo group were all “virtually entirely fabricated” and that the scale of the fraud at the venture was “staggering”.

Tingo Mobile reported cash and cash equivalents of $461.7mn for 2022 in its Nigerian bank accounts, but the SEC said its balance was less than $50.

Hindenburg, the US-based short seller, cast doubts on the viability of the business last year, calling it an “exceptionally obvious scam” in a report that sent Tingo’s stock prices plummeting more than 60 per cent on the day of its release.

The charges filed last year came a month after the SEC halted the trading in the shares of Nasdaq-listed Tingo Group and Agri-Fintech Holdings over what the agency described as “questions and concerns regarding the adequacy and accuracy of publicly available information”.

The entrepreneur shot into the limelight last year when he launched an audacious bid to buy Sheffield United, a Yorkshire-based club that played in the English Premier League last year and is now in the second tier of English football.

Mmobuosi and his companies could not be immediately reached for comment.