There is a particular kind of fortune that never needs to hide, because it is built entirely out of paper that the law itself compels into the open. It sits in audited financial statements that any shareholder may demand, in registers that any citizen may inspect for a fee, in declarations that company law requires directors to sign with their own hands. It is not buried. It is not coded. It is simply arranged, layer upon layer, until the arrangement itself becomes the concealment, and the man at the centre of it can point to every document and say, truthfully, that nothing was ever hidden.
The documents SecretsReporters reviewed, the full audited financial statements of Access Holdings for 2024 and 2025, and the corporate filings at the United Kingdom’s Companies House, do not allege that a single naira was looted. What they record, in numbers that reconcile to the last share, is the complete architecture of one man’s documented wealth inside the group he chairs: Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede, chairman of Access Holdings Plc, holds, directly and indirectly, 4,998,212,144 shares in the company, 9.37 percent of its entire issued share capital, worth N106,981,739,882 at the N21.40 closing price of 31 December 2025, just under N107 billion in a single line of a single table.
The arithmetic of a throne
The holding is not one block. It is five. In the FY2025 directors’ shareholding table, his direct interest stands at 178,847,572 shares, 0.34 percent. Around it sit four vehicles. United Alliance Company of Nigeria Limited holds 1,056,320,373 shares for his account. Trust and Capital Limited holds 1,147,316,397. Coronation Trustees Limited holds 1,974,698,283. Tengen Holdings Limited holds 641,029,519. The indirect total is 4,819,364,572 shares. Add the direct line and the architecture resolves into a single figure: 4,998,212,144 shares, 9.37 percent of Access Holdings, a bank holding company whose balance sheet runs into tens of trillions of naira, held by the man who chairs its board.
To hold 9.37 percent of Access Holdings is to be, on the face of the bank’s own audited book, its single largest individual beneficiary, larger than any other named person in the directors’ table. He is not the bank’s chief executive. He does not draw a salary line in these statements as an executive. He is its non-executive chairman, the office that oversees the executives, and the register records that the overseer is also the largest personal fortune inside the house.
The Mauritius ghost in the filings
Inside that architecture sits a name that changed between one audited book and the next, and the change is the kind that only a reader of both books would ever catch. In the FY2024 audited statements of Access Holdings, printed in the directors’ interests table on the authority of the audit, one of the four vehicles is named in full: Coronation Trustees Tengen Mauritius. In the FY2025 book, the same table, carrying the same number of shares down to the unit, 1,974,698,283, names the holder simply as Coronation Trustees Limited. The Mauritius word is gone. The shares are identical. The vehicle is the same vehicle, its offshore tail quietly amputated from the printed name in the year after the chairman took his seat.
The change is confined to that table. In the FY2025 free-float statement, printed elsewhere in the same audited book, the full name still stands: Coronation Trustees Tengen Mauritius, printed in full, at 3,949,396,566 shares, 7.41 percent. That free-float figure is exactly double the directors’ table figure. The same vehicle appears in one audited book at two different sizes, and in the successor book under two different names, and no footnote in either book explains either the doubling or the disappearance of the word Mauritius.
Mauritius is not a decorative word in Nigerian banking. It is the jurisdiction through which a generation of Nigerian fortunes routed their holdings, the treaty-shopping capital of the continent’s money, and its appearance or disappearance in a bank’s audited book is a fact of the first order. The documents do not say why the name was shortened. They record only that it was, in the directors’ interests table, in the first full audited year of the chairman’s tenure, while the free-float statement in the same book kept the full name standing.
Two men, one vault
The FY2024 book holds one more mirror. In that year’s directors’ interests table, the late Herbert Wigwe, the group chief executive who died in February 2024, is recorded with a direct holding of 201,231,713 shares, close to the chairman’s own direct line, and an indirect holding of exactly 4,819,364,572 shares. Exactly. The same indirect figure, to the single share, as the indirect holding the FY2025 book attributes to Aig-Imoukhuede. Two different men, two different offices, one identical number, printed in audited statements a year apart.
The documents do not explain the mirror. They do not say whether the vault was shared, inherited, restructured or merely printed twice by an error nobody caught. A figure of 4.8 billion shares does not repeat itself by accident in the audited book of a systemically important bank, and it does not repeat itself innocently either, without a paper trail somewhere that joins the two names to the same four vehicles. The trail, if it exists, is not in the published statements. What is in the published statements is the number, twice.
The manor on South Road
The architecture has an English address. Companies House, the United Kingdom’s official corporate registry, records his wife, Ofovwe Aig-Imoukhuede, the woman with whom he founded the Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation, as sole director of Zaimore Limited, company number 10706443, appointed on 4 April 2017 and still in post. She is also the company’s sole person with significant control, recorded as holding 75 percent or more of its shares and voting rights, with the right to appoint and remove directors. Her date of birth is given as January 1970. Her correspondence address is given as All Seasons, South Road, St Georges Hill, Weybridge, Surrey, KT13 8DE. Zaimore Limited is an active company that files dormant accounts.
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