Documents in possession of SecretsReporters establish that on 27 May 2021 a London company named The Hyde Incorporated Limited was registered with Jennifer Douglas-Abubakar, the former wife of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, as its sole director and controlling owner. No news report anywhere has named this company, her control of it, or the family shareholding inside it.
The company was formed with 100 ordinary shares of one pound each. Jennifer Douglas-Abubakar took 80 of them. Her son Anthony Chuka Douglas took 10. Zara Atiku Abubakar took 5, and Abdulmalik Atiku Abubakar took 5. The four of them authenticated the formation together, and the capital stood at a nominal 100 pounds.
Her control was registered in the fullest form the law provides. She was recorded from the day of formation as the person with significant control of the company, holding 75 percent or more of its shares, 75 percent or more of its voting rights, and the right to appoint or remove a majority of its board. She was also its only director. There was no other officer at any point in the company’s life. Her particulars on the formation record are a July 1960 date of birth, Nigerian nationality, residence in the United Kingdom, and the occupation of lawyer.
The business the company registered for itself was real estate. Its first registered office was at the offices of Daniel Ford International on Balfe Street in Islington. On 1 June 2022 the registered office moved to 9 Knightsbridge Green in Knightsbridge, one of the most expensive addresses in London.
For all the control concentrated in it, the company declared on its own filings that it never traded. It filed accounts as a dormant company for the period to 31 May 2023, and its share capital never rose above the nominal sum it was formed with. No property purchase, no contract and no trading record in its name has surfaced anywhere.
Its end came in the summer of 2023. A compulsory strike-off process opened in April of that year was discontinued in June, the company applied the same month to strike itself off the register, and on 29 August 2023 it was dissolved by voluntary strike-off. The whole vehicle, from formation to dissolution, lived for two years and three months entirely inside the family.
The timing sits beside a marriage that was ending. The company was formed weeks before Jennifer Douglas-Abubakar sought a divorce in June 2021, and the marriage to Atiku Abubakar ended that year. Everything that followed, the Knightsbridge Green move, the dormant filings and the dissolution, was done in her sole name after the marriage, not as the wife of any office holder.
That distinction carries a legal weight of its own. Under the Code of Conduct for public officers in the Fifth Schedule to the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, a public officer must declare all his properties, assets and liabilities, and those of his spouse and his unmarried children under the age of eighteen, on assumption of office, every four years in office, and at the end of his tenure. Assets held abroad are not outside the duty. They must be declared like assets at home. An asset acquired after a declaration and not covered by it is presumed to have been acquired in breach of the Code until the officer explains it, and a proven breach carries removal from office, disqualification from public office for up to ten years, and forfeiture of property acquired in abuse of office. It is the net the law casts so that companies and properties held in a wife’s name during a husband’s tenure surface on the public record. The Hyde Incorporated Limited was created fourteen years after Atiku Abubakar left the vice presidency and after his marriage to its owner had ended, so it sat outside that net entirely, and it has stayed invisible until now.
Hyde was not the only company at that address with her name on it. What the public was told about Isibani, the Afro-European restaurant at 9 Knightsbridge Green, is that it was founded by Anthony Douglas Chuka and Abdulmalik Abubakar and opened on 11 July 2022. What was never reported is who sat on the board of the company behind it while it traded. Jennifer Douglas-Abubakar was a director of Isibani UK Ltd from ten days before the restaurant opened until the first day of 2023, when the entire company changed hands in a single day.
Isibani UK Ltd was incorporated on 19 April 2022 at an address on the High Street in Strood, Kent. Its founders were her sons. Anthony Chuka and Abdulmalik Atiku-Abubakar were the first directors, the only shareholders with 50 of the 100 ordinary shares each, and the two persons with significant control. On 3 May 2022 the registered office moved to 9 Knightsbridge Green, the restaurant’s address, weeks before The Hyde Incorporated Limited moved its own registered office to the same address.
The board turned over within weeks. A third director, Rodolfo Jr. Macalino Abinal, was appointed on 15 June 2022. Both founding sons resigned as directors on 27 June 2022, although their control entries as persons with significant control ran on. Four days later, on 1 July 2022, Jennifer Douglas-Abubakar was appointed a director. Her filed particulars are a July 1960 date of birth, Nigerian nationality, residence in the United Kingdom, and the occupation of entrepreneur. The identical date of birth stands on the filings of both Knightsbridge Green companies.
She held the seat through the restaurant’s first season, from its opening night in July 2022 to the end of that year. She was never a shareholder of the company and never held a control entry in it. The ownership on paper stayed with her sons while their mother sat on the board of the company their restaurant traded under.
On 1 January 2023 the whole structure was replaced in a single day. Her directorship was terminated. The third director’s appointment was terminated the same day. The control entries of both her sons ceased the same day. In their place, Eugene Obiora Iwenjiora was appointed sole director and notified as the person with significant control, holding 75 percent or more of the shares. A confirmation statement filed the following August completed the picture: the two founding blocks of shares, her sons’ blocks, were both in his name, the whole shareholding of the company.
The man in whose name the whole company landed is a Nigerian lawyer born in January 1960 and resident in Nigeria. In one day Isibani UK Ltd passed out of the hands of Atiku Abubakar’s two sons and their mother altogether.
None of it reached the public record in time to be seen. The changes took effect on 1 January 2023 but were filed together only on 12 August 2023, more than seven months later, so anyone reading the register through the first half of 2023 saw the old board and the old control. The company itself did not last much longer. It applied to strike itself off the register in November 2023 and was dissolved by voluntary strike-off on 3 December 2024.
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