It’s part of a five-part series about potential investors and their interest in English football, their ambitions and the game itself.
The first part was about Chris Kirchner, who was on the verge of taking over County Derby and was later convicted of fraud and money laundering.
In the 1990s gangster classic, Goodfellas, protagonist Henry Hill opts for ultimate flexibility on his first date with his wife Karen, taking her through the kitchen of New York’s coolest club, skipping the line outside, to a front-row table that’s just been created for them.
It’s a scene that sums up the movie (Henry and his friends don’t stand in line) and ends with a question that underscores that point.
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“What are you doing?” Karen asks.
That’s a question I asked Dozy Mmobuosi last year after I walked into the basement of the Dorchester Hotel to sit across from him at the chef’s table: “the most productive seat in the house,” a personal dining room separated from the kitchen through glass. Wall that can be transparent so you can see how your food is prepared, or opaque so no one can see who you’ve invited.
I had been summoned to London’s Mayfair for an open interview with the 45-year-old after his bet on Sheffield United, then in the Championship and now in the Premier League.
On February 2, 2023, The Times reported that the “Nigerian tech billionaire” was “on the verge” of buying the Yorkshire club for £90 million (now $115 million). The newspaper said that Mmobuosi’s Tingo Mobile company had been valued at $7. 6 billion and that the deal is conditional on Mmobuosi passing the EFL owners and managers test, but “so far no problems have arisen. “
The story was picked up by several British and foreign media outlets, who noted that Mmobuosi had just appeared on the cover of GQ Africa and presented the Dozy Mmobuosi Foundation at a ball held in Dorchester.
Within 48 hours, dozens of articles were published with new data and photographs taken from Mmobuosi’s social media accounts and Tingo’s website. There were snapshots of Mmobuosi by a fireplace, one with his arm around British heavyweight boxer Anthony Joshua, several of him in a black tie. with Nigerian presidential candidate Peter Obi and Senegalese-American singer and businessman Akon, and one more. Casual clothes on your table in front of a laptop.
According to press clippings, in addition to owning Tingo Mobile, he had just launched an online marketplace called Tingo Foods, built Nigeria’s largest food processing plant, opened a business school, and introduced a cellular cancer screening service in Nigeria. Oh, and it’s being developed in Ghana, Malawi and the United Arab Emirates. The acquisition of Sheffield United is “imminent” and his private fortune “north of £5 billion”.
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In fact, he was so confident of taking over Sheffield United that he told reporters he had already paid a non-refundable deposit of almost £10 million to the club’s Saudi owner, Prince Abdullah. For a club struggling to pay for critical expenses and moving deadlines, Mmobuosi’s millions were a lifeline.
Four days after the Times scoop, The Athletic reported that Tingo Airlines, Mmobuosi’s aviation business, had not taken off. This is despite claiming that you can “fly with Tingo Airlines today” from London to Nigeria in November 2020 and that the UK-registered company had a percentage capital of £1 billion.
A closer look at those allegations revealed that the company’s business, a rented flat near Luton, had been removed from the online page of Companies House, the UK’s registrar of companies, because it was “invalid or useless and falsified”. In addition, Tingo Airlines faces an active delisting proposal due to its backlog of fundamental procedures.
There is also no evidence that Tingo held the UK Air Operator’s Certificate or that he was “in the process of obtaining” an aircraft. Photographs of the plane on the company’s website, which were riddled with missing links, were airbrushed versions of inventory photographs of an Airbus A321. Whoever added Tingo’s décor also added additional windows and removed a door.
Mmobuosi responded with a flurry of media activity, adding lengthy interviews with CNN and former England and Manchester United defender Rio Ferdinand on his YouTube channel FIVE. The mix-up with the airline was the fault of the pandemic.
Meanwhile, the club remained silent on Mmobuosi or the takeover, which they claimed was the PR strategy agreed with their team. Some members of his team were also a bit through the media blitz, but the game went on.
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Before I met him at Dorchester, I had been warned that Mmobuosi was “annoyed” by the media policy of his takeover attempt through The Athletic, so I had to expect a frosty reception. And that’s what I got, though not from the so-called tech billionaire in a baseball cap from Oxford University’s Said Business School.
The coldness came from the gentleman sitting next to him, a British football agent who sought to instill in me the importance of being on “the right side of this story”. In not-so-subtle terms, I was warned that our policy of Mmobuosi’s attempt to get the first black owner in English football can be perceived as racist.
I tell this story to shed light on some of the other people deceived by Mmobuosi and why so many of them sought him. And that’s why I don’t name the agent: he’s pretty embarrassed.
Because the trail of unpaid expenses and salaries that Mmobuosi has left in the UK will make things even more complicated for any valid African businessman who follows him in his bid to buy an English football club.
Seven weeks after we met, Mmobuosi issued a statement denying the failure of his bid for Sheffield United. By then, it had already failed.
In early June, his business empire revealed that it was nothing more than wishful thinking, with a damning report claiming that the Tingo Group was “a useless and blatant fraud. “As 2023 moved into 2024, Mmobuosi charged 3 counts of fraud in the U. S. U. S. The Department of Justice and accused of carrying out a global scam of “staggering” magnitude through the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which said Tingo Mobile had less than $50 in a Nigerian bank, while Mmobuosi claimed it had $460 million. He denies all charges.
Mmobuosi answered my question and took just two hours to explain how his Tingo corporate organisation would harness the strength of Nigerian farmers to conquer Wall Street, feed the world, cure cancer and bring European football to Bramall Lane.
It’s a story. But none of that would ever happen.
In February, Mmobuosi traveled to the Highlands with British fashion designer Ozwald Boateng to sell a whiskey distillery. They flew north on a personal jet with Mmobuosi’s leader and his PR team, while a doorman drove one of the Rolls-Royces Mmobuosi rented in London to meet them at the other end.
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The Times reported that Boateng said Mmobuosi had “an almost magical quality. “There is no indication that Boateng is anything other than a user enchanted through the mirage of Mmobuosi. Boateng did not respond to requests for comment from The Athletic.
On the way to Scotland, the organisers stopped for a quick excursion to Ardross Castle, where the BBC’s hit show, The Traitors, takes place. Mmobuosi had told the owners that he was interested in buying the place.
In his interview with Ferdinand, Mmobuosi said his first verbal exchange with an English club owner was with Crystal Palace co-owner John Textor. That verbal exchange, however, didn’t cross the line between a match stop and a late-night drink. binge on Textor’s advisor and Mmobuosi’s bodyguards.
Southampton was another club Mmobuosi had expressed interest in in the past, while its affiliates, including British lawyer Chris Cleverly, cousin of UK Home Secretary James Cleverly, were connected to West Ham in 2021. None of those offers were successful.
Starting investment conversations has never been a challenge for Mmobuosi, who was born in Lagos in 1978. Her first business promoted second-hand clothes at school when she was 13 years old.
According to media profiles written about him in Nigeria in 2020, he also sold “general provisions” at school and was nicknamed “The General. “
After being homeschooled, he claims to have earned a bachelor’s degree in political science, then a master’s degree in economics from Ambrose Alli University in Nigeria, before earning a PhD in rural progression from Universiti Putra Malaysia; This institution has no PhD background. . Sleepy.
Legend has it that he became a promoter of beauty pageants and concerts in Nigeria between 1999 and 2002. And that time, he and his father introduced the company that would later travel the world: Tingo Mobile.
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Originally known as the Fair Deal Concept, his first product was his father’s book on the “419 scam,” perhaps the most notorious of the advance payment scams anyone with an email address will have encountered. Quiz enthusiasts and “Nigerian princes” You may be interested to know that Section 419 is the segment of Nigeria’s Penal Code that deals with fraud.
Mmobuosi
In 2013, he came up with the concept he’d been championing for the past decade: phones for farmers. Its story – and it sticks to it – is that Tingo Mobile has distributed 30 million phones and has more than nine million consumers who use them. Tingo devices, with pre-installed Tingo apps, to carry out banking operations, check the weather and know the costs of your purchases.
The service is said to have brought Tingo Mobile millions of dollars in revenue. There was an unfortunate mix-up in 2017, when Mmobuosi bought £60,000 worth of fuel for its “aircraft meeting facilities” with bad cheques. He was charged with 8 counts of fraud and made the impression at the Lagos Magistrate’s Court in 2018.
The final results of this lawsuit are unclear, with Mmobuosi later claiming that the dispute was resolved through arbitration.
In 2019, after moving to the UK, Mmobuosi was looking to share the plethora of opportunities presented through Tingo with investors around the world, which meant placing it on the world’s most prominent stock market for tech companies: the Nasdaq in New York.
Tom Winnifrith, an economic journalist-turned-stock-connoisseur, has been ridiculing Tingo’s figures on his private platform and shareprophets. com since September 2022.
Winnifrith said his scathing pen focused on the “obvious scam” of the colorful group of characters connected to Tingo; men like Leslie Greyling, the U. K. -based South African investor who was convicted of fraud twice and deported from the U. S. in the 1990s.
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“Grayling is a red flag, but Tingo’s finances haven’t stood up to even fundamental scrutiny,” Winnifrith says. “They had a subsidiary that claimed to have many millions in the bank but borrowed from another, while one of their Nigerian food corporations had revenues of six hundred percent of the market share. “
InsightX, a UK-based due diligence agency, had also highlighted “reputational risks” in a detailed report it had prepared on Mmobuosi for an English club it had reviewed ahead of Sheffield United. Among his considerations were Mmobuosi’s ties to former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan. whose tenure as African head of state has been mired in corruption allegations.
So was his flirtation with football a chance to make headlines about his business acumen and wealth?And to advertise Tingo Mobile, which had just merged with a public company for the second time in just over a year?
The most recent merger took place with a hard-to-understand tech company called MICT. There were very few external benefits from the Nasdaq board that Mmobuosi had long sought for Tingo. Both mergers resulted in the creation of hundreds of millions of new shares for Mmobuosi and the top executives of the companies in question.
Last month, Nigerian online site Vanguard asked Mmobuosi if he regretted making an offer for Sheffield United. He said he has no further regrets, adding that his only goal is to “connect a city as disenfranchised as Sheffield and a company as disenfranchised as Tingo. “, and that their money helps the club pay their expenses and get promoted.
“This story hasn’t been told anywhere because it’s not a sexy story: a black man stockpiled the club,” he explained. “
On Valentine’s Day last year, the EFL issued a statement saying it had observed “evidence of the origin and sufficiency” of Mmobuosi’s funds, but had been “waiting for an answer for some time” to “a number of additional questions. “
Four days later, The Athletic reported on some of those claims: three county court judgments against Mmobuosi and his companies for approximately £40,000 in unpaid rent and bills. We have also raised questions about the figures claimed by Tingo in his filings with the US monetary authorities.
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Mmobuosi and a large team of advisers met with the EFL at its Preston headquarters at the end of March, but the league had heard and noticed enough to know the acquisition had been completed. And in May, the scenario was very different for the club and the Tingo Group. , the mix was renamed MICT/Tingo Mobile. Sheffield United’s money problems were solved thanks to the promotion and the percentage value of the Tingo Group crossed the $5 mark.
Then, on June 6, Hindenburg Research, a New York-based company that has been reporting fraud since 2017, dropped a bombshell on Tingo.
While this is certainly helping the stock markets, Hindenburg’s motivations aren’t entirely altruistic, as the company is also an activist short seller, meaning it makes money from the companies it targets by betting that their share prices will plummet.
The gamble on Tingo really paid off, as its percentage value fell by more than a part on the day Hindenburg’s scathing report was released.
Titled “Tingo Group: Fake Farmers, Phones, and Finance: The Nigerian Empire That Isn’t,” the report began with the news that Hindenburg was shorting Tingo shares because “we, the company, are a very blatant scam with absolutely fabricated monetary data. “From there, things went downhill for Mmobuosi.
According to Hindenburg, Mmobuosi had lied about inventing a payment app, he didn’t have a PhD, the operating margin claimed through Tingo Foods would make it the most efficient food company on the planet, the food processing plant Tingo said he was building is an empty field, his accounts were full of absurd numbers, no consumers could be discovered in the fields of Nigeria and their offices were empty. A hail of punches to Tingo’s head followed.
“Overall, we believe Tingo is a petty and blatant fraud that deserves to be a humiliating embarrassment to all involved,” he concludes. “We don’t think the company will last long in this world. “
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The Tingo Group attempted to fight back, pointing out that Hindenburg was a short trader and had his skin in the game, and dismissed the report as “misleading and defamatory. “Tingo added that he had told the foreign law firm White
In August, Tingo published what he considered an explanation for Hindenburg’s erroneous conclusions, but that only caused the research company to pull out and the percentage value to fall further. When asked if he had conducted the external review of Tingo, White
“When we look at as many frauds as we have, you can feel like you’ve noticed it all before,” says Nate Anderson, founder of Hindenburg. “But typically, the control of those corporations will have told a lie or two about a specific deal or new product.
“Tingo different. They had built a total conglomerate. Underneath every rock we looked at, we discovered a lie. I had never realized that before.
However, you can’t stop a smart man. In October, Mmobuosi published photographs of new houses it had financed in Malawi for cyclone-affected people and signed an agreement with Pakistan’s state-owned company for the development of generation. There are no images or data about the deal yet on the Pakistani company’s website or social media. Houses in Malawi look real, as the African country gave Mmobuosi a diplomatic passport for his troubles.
The explanation for why he wants it became apparent in December, when the SEC opened a civil lawsuit in New York against Mmobuosi and three of his corporations for what he described as a “massive scheme . . . multi-year. . . aimed at defrauding investors around the world. “
His 72-page damning complaint. For four years, he said, Mmobuosi had fabricated bank statements, falsified income and falsified customers. For example, when he was looking to buy Sheffield United, he filed documents in the United States indicating that Tingo Mobile had more than $460 million in banks in Nigeria. It actually costs less than $50.
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He also explained how he paid for his lavish lifestyle in London and Sheffield United’s bail. Last year, it sold more than $10 million in shares of Grupo Tingo and $2 million in shares of other of its companies. It also allegedly pocketed an internal loan of $10 million for the acquisition of mobile phones and “diverted” another $16 million from the Tingo Group’s accounts to its own.
In January, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation charged Mmobuosi with three counts of fraud punishable by between five and 20 years each.
“Dozy Mmobuosi allegedly orchestrated a grand scheme to inflate the Tingo Group’s monetary statements and give the impression that the agricultural and cell phone corporations he founded were profitable, cash-rich corporations when in fact they were not,” said U. S. Attorney Damian Williams. .
“With this indictment, Mmobuosi’s alleged plan comes to an end. “
The press also describes Mmobuosi as “at large. “
If you think this suggests you’ve collapsed, think again. Mmobuosi has given interviews to journalists in Nigeria over the past 10 weeks, telling them the allegations are “baseless”, that he is preparing his defence and that he still lives in the UK and “cannot be considered to be at large”.
However, none of the other people he owes money to in the UK have noticed, nor do they expect to see it.
Meanwhile, Sheffield United owner Prince Abdullah is seeking legal advice on whether he should return Mmobuosi’s bail to US authorities as it would be the proceeds of crime.
Mmobuosi, meanwhile, continues to fight back and “writes an e-book that tells the story,” as he told Vanguard last month.
Tingo’s return here.
(Design: Eammon Dalton. Photos: Adam Fussell; Matt McNulty/Getty Images; SportImage/Getty Images)