Transcorp

Transcorp: Still On Obasanjo’s Opaque Transparency Campaign

Senior Fyneface

The announcement that President Olusegun Obasanjo’s has ordered a divestment of his 220 million directly purchased equity shares in Transnational Corporation (Transcorp) deserves celebration especially as it confirms that the president actually had direct personal involvement in the organisation whether in blind arrangement or with his eyes fully opened.

Prior to this time, there seems to have been a conspiracy of silence on the controversies generated by Transcorp, an overnight transnational abiku business giant that was priced at N6 per share at the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) even before coming into existence in the real sense. This is aside all the sweet deals it had won, with or without money to pay, in the ongoing privatization programme of state-owned businesses.

Although the attention of the Nigerian public has been drawn to recent speculations that the corporate profile of Transcorp has been tampered with, perhaps in a bid to ensure that President Obasanjo is no longer directly linked to the ownership of 220million shares of the company, the acceptance by members of Corporate Nigeria that the President had some direct personal involvement, in the first instance, is a great victory to the campaign on transparency and accountability

As was recently exposed by the Nigerian press, President Obasanjo secretly subscribed to over 220million shares in Transcorp, which were held in a blind trust by Obasanjo Holdings Limited (OHL) through Ota Farms Limited, the president’s personal investment outfit.

Controversies generated by the President’s denial of direct investment or any form of involvement in Transcorp and the alleged altering of the corporation’s registration documents at the Corporate Affairs Commission, forced lawmakers to summon the Chairman of Transcorp who also is the Director General of the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) Dr Ndi Okereke-Onyiuke.

The Transcorp chairperson, interesting, told the lawmakers several things, most of them very confusing. She told the lawmakers that the President had subscribed for an undisclosed number of shares but had instructed his son the manager of Obasanjo Farms to divest from the organisation as the family can no longer cope with the bad press the investment has generated.

The dual purpose NSE DG and Transcorp Chairman should have known before her public comment that the President’s instruction to his son to divest from Transcorp has nothing to do with the issue at stake. Did Mr President bought or rather subscribe 220 million Transcorp shares in the first instance? Yes; so he is guilty of gross abuse of office and unrighteous influence peddling. This is the truth.

And to stressed that there was nothing unusual about the transaction since the President had “announced it openly that he would buy,” was an outright insult on the intelligence of Nigerians whose money the President used in the purchase of the 22o million shares.

First, Dr Ndidi Onyiuke-Okereke admitted that President Olusegun Obasanjo invested in Transcorp through Obasanjo Farms Ltd and not through a blind trust as reported in the media as no investor in Transcorp did so through a blind trust. “When I read that the president invested in Transcorp through a blind trust, I went and asked him whether he indeed invested in the company. He told me he had no interest in the company but said he directed his Obasanjo Farms to invest in the corporation since it is a good business”. If the President has no interest in the organization so which investment in Transcorp did he ordered his son to divest?

As if the confusion already created was not enough, the dual purpose chairperson, at the same sitting turned around to further contradict herself when she denied that President Obasanjo is a shareholder in Transcorp. She said the organization has no shareholders currently. “What we only have now are subscribers, the list of which has been sent to the NSE for approval before they can become shareholders”. Is this not a big deceit? From that response, it was clear that the entire lecture on the difference between shareholding and subscription and the proper placement of Mr President in either of the two groups was purely that of Ndi Okereke-Onyiuke. The same person who is sending the list of subscribers to the NSE as Chairman of Transcorp is also the same person expected to approve the list at the other end as the DG of NSE- what confusion or rather deceit.

Ndi Okereke-Onyiuke’s sterile academic adventure in trying to define and differentiate between share holding and subscription is nothing but a lecture for dummies.

This same Corporate Nigerian woman further aggravated the confusion by saying that she cannot confirm whether the President’s instruction to the Ota Farm manager has been carried out “because the son of the president to whom the instruction was said to have been given was out of the country”, maybe to source for foreign investors to pick the shares the Obasanjos wanted to divest. How else can one describe Ndi’s confusion or unpreparedness to discuss the corporate monster Transcorp, if not to say that obviously under pressure before lawmakers, the Transcorp chairwoman spoke from the two sides of her mouth?