By James Ubadike
The controversial government contractor, Emeka Offor, has fallen on hard times, we can authoritatively reveal.
Months before the consortium of Interstate Electrics which he led in a futile bid to acquire the Enugu Electricity Distribution Company failed to pay the remaining 75% the $160m reserve bid price for the company, word had been making round that the flamboyant businessman has for several months been in a financial mess.
The principal cause of his financial woes is the four dry holes he struck in Sao Tome and Principe which cost him over $400m. He acquired the right to explore and produce oil in this tiny West African island nation during the Olusegun Obasanjo regime which controversially gave him a lion’s share of Nigeria’s interests in the joint free trade zone.
Ironically, Offor has since fallen out with Obasanjo, and has not minced words in telling people how he dealt with the former president “over Obasanjo’s greed”.
Things are so hard for the businessman that meeting basic obligations to his staff “has become a herculean task”, according to impeccable sources in his offices in Abuja and Houston, Texas.
Despite his financial difficulties, Offor donated a whopping $1.3m to Rotary International for polio eradication, and traveled last month to Lisbon, Portugal, with erstwhile Senate President Ken Nnamani to receive an award for the hefty gift.
The donation has pitted him against some directors of his company like Howard Jetta, a former American ambassador to Nigeria, and two erstwhile Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) executives who turned down his request for money to recapitalize his Chrome Energy.
“The money you donated to Rotary International just to earn an applause for a few minutes is needed more in the company than anywhere else”, one of them told him angrily on the phone.
With the loss of the bid to acquire the Enugu Disco, Offor and his partners in Interstate Electrics who include Metropolitan Electricity Authority of Thailand have incurred more serious financial losses.
They had in May paid 25% of the $160m reserve bid for the Enugu electricity distribution firm, which is $40m. In addition, they paid over $1.5m to various consultants to assist them prepare the bids for not just Enugu but also Abuja discos.
Some top editors in Lagos had in the last two weeks got a hint of Offor’s financial problems when his media agents began to go round newspaper houses with heavy bribes to induce them to campaign for an extension of the August 21, 2013, deadline for the payment of the outstanding 75% of the bid prices on the supposed grounds that the government had not resolved labour issues with the PHCN staff.
At the expiration of the deadline for payment at 5pm on Wednesday, August 21, 2013, out of the 15 preferred bidders only Offor’s Interstate Electrics and the North-South consortium which had won the preferred bid for the Shiroro power station in Niger State could not pay.
Offor’s spirited attempts to get Vice President Nmadi Sambo, who is the chairman of the National Council on Privatisation, to make a special case for him were unsuccessful.
“He was told point blank”, said a source in The Presidency, “that international development partners like the United States International Development Agency (USAID) and the Department of International Development of the British government, which are involved in the bid process as observers, would not accept it.
“This was why the bids from Dangote and Rockson Engineering for two generation firms were disallowed in July, last year; both bids arrived only a few minutes late.
“He was also given the example of Otunba Mike Adenuga who could not awarded a GSM licence in 2001 when MTN , NITEL and Airtel received theirs because of a silly mistake.
“Offor understood, from his countenance, that the integrity of the privatization process must be beyond reproach at all times and in all circumstances”.
Offor’s effort to raise a loan from Africa Import-Export Bank also failed. The authorities at the bank were worried that he ran Afex Bank aground in 2006 and “the fact that he is a politically exposed person”.
In response to the negative outcome of the due diligence, Offor hired a coterie of hack writers like Dr Okey Ikechukwu, a member of Thisday editorial board, to burnish his image. The expected magic failed woefully.
Offor, a former earth moving equipment driver with Julius Berger plc, made national headlines for the first time during the Sani Abacha dictatorship when he became the first Nigerian to be awarded a turn around maintenance (TAM) of an oil refinery. Awarded the contract to carry out TAM on the 125,000barrel per day Warri Refinery and Petrochemicals Company for over $100m, the contract was barely executed, and the refinery has not recovered since then.
The contract was a fraud packaged by Abacha, the then Minister of Petroleum Resources, Daniel Etete, and Abacha’s secretary to the government of the federation, Gidado Idris, who is Offor’s god father.
As a result of the contract which was fully paid for, Offor commenced an energetic campaign in the media demanding that Abacha be transmuted to a life president. He said that in Abacha and his wife, Maryam, “the nation will have two leaders for the price of one!”
