Nigeria’s Tingo CEO Fined $250 Million Over ‘Fabricated’ FinTechs

A federal court has fined Nigerian businessman Dozy Mmobuosi $250 million following a fraud investigation.

The court order — issued last week and the subject of a report Sunday (Sept. 1) by the Financial Times (FT) — also bars Mmobuosi from serving as a director of a public company.

The ruling follows charges last year by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which had accused Mmobuosi and three of his companies with fraud for inflating the “financial performance metrics of his companies and key operating subsidiaries to defraud investors worldwide.” The SEC further alleged that these companies amounted to a “fiction.”

The ruling came after Mmobuosi and his companies, Tingo Group Agri-Fintech Holdings and Tingo International Holdings, “failed to answer, plead, or otherwise defend” themselves in court.

PYMNTS has contacted Tingo for comment but has not yet gotten a reply.

According to the FT report, Tingo, a Nigerian FinTech company, had claimed it had upwards of 9 million customers in its home country, most of them farmers, and that it operated a food processing business.

The company had cultivated some high-profile relationships in recent years. In 2022, it merged with Nasdaq-listed financial services provider MICT in a $900 million deal aimed at helping the companies expand across Africa and Asia. And in 2023, Tingo teamed with Visa to introduce a super app for farmers in Africa.

Mmobuosi last year also tried to purchase Sheffield United, a Yorkshire-based football club, per the FT report.

But the SEC had said that Tingo’s “purported assets, revenues, expenses, customers and suppliers” were all “virtually entirely fabricated,” calling it fraud on a “staggering” scale: The company had reported cash and cash equivalents of $461.7 million for 2022 in its Nigerian bank accounts, but the SEC said its balance was under $50.

And Hindenburg Research, a short seller based in the U.S., shed doubt on Tingo’s viability last year, issuing a report that called the company an “exceptionally obvious scam,” which caused Tingo’s share price to plunge more than 60%.

Mmobuosi stepped down as CEO of Tingo last year, with the company saying at the time that it intended to “vigorously defend itself in relation to the SEC complaint.” Tingo voluntarily delisted from the Nasdaq earlier this year.