The contract was awarded without any public bidding process, and a minister told OCCRP the government is now facing a legal challenge.
In May, the government announced the first phase of building by Hitech Construction Company Ltd., which is a subsidiary of a conglomerate owned by the brothers Ronald and Gilbert Chagoury.
Hitech Construction has been awarded the contract for the entire project, which will cost an estimated $13 billion, with funding to be secured as it progresses.
Activists and opposition politicians lambasted the deal, arguing that it violated regulations because it was not done through a public tender. Minister of Works David Umahi said the government is fighting a legal battle in relation to the highway.
“The entire process is before the court,” he said in a text message to OCCRP.
Critics also highlighted the longstanding business dealings and friendship between the Chagoury brothers and President Bola Tinubu. Umahi said the relationship played no role in the construction contract.
“The Lagos Calabar Coastal Highway procurement followed due process and the president hasn’t any hand in the award or execution,” he said.
The association between Tinubu and the Chagoury brothers is well known to Nigerians. But OCCRP has discovered that the younger generation also had a corporate relationship.
The president’s son, Oluwaseyi Tinubu, was a majority shareholder in an offshore company alongside Ronald Chagoury Jr, who shares a name with his father. The firm was incorporated eight years ago in the British Virgin Islands.
The BVI offers corporate anonymity, but the involvement of the two men was revealed in company documents leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The current ownership of the BVI firm is unknown.
Oluwaseyi Tinubu and Ronald Chagoury Jr did not respond to requests for comment, nor did the Chagoury Group.
Ayotunde Abiodun of SBM Intelligence, a Nigeria-based risk consultancy firm, said public officials and their close relatives are expected to avoid conflicts of interest in order to uphold public trust.
He added that the business and personal relationships between the Tinubu and Chagoury families fuels suspicion among Nigerians due to “systemic corruption and pervasive lack of accountability within the country's governance.”
Nigeria last year ranked 145 out of 180 countries on an annual index measuring perceptions of corruption, which is published by the advocacy group Transparency International. A country perceived to have the lowest corruption level is ranked at 1.
Graft has long plagued Nigeria, and Gilbert Chagoury was convicted in Switzerland in 2000 of laundering money for the country’s former military dictator, Sani Abacha.
The relationship between Nigeria’s current president and the Chagoury brothers goes back to at least 2007 when Tinubu was governor of Lagos State. That year, Tinubu’s administration granted the Chagoury Group title to 10-million square meters of land on the seashore of the country’s commercial capital, Lagos
Hitech Construction is now building Eko Atlantic City on that land, which is held by South Energyx, a Chagoury Group subsidiary where the younger Ronald serves as vice-chairman. The highway begins at Eko Atlantic City, running south down the coast to Calabar, in the oil-rich Niger Delta.
In February, the government approved 1 trillion Nigerian naira (about $670 million depending on currency fluctuations) in funding for Hitech to build the first 47 kilometers of road. The government plans to provide up to 30 percent of the funding for the entire project, Umahi has said, with Hitech expected to raise the rest.
President Tinubu said the highway would boost Nigeria’s economy and “provide 30 million people with improved access to production and marketing centers.”
In a May statement, he also “applauded” the Chagoury brothers “for being worthy stakeholders and for believing in the future of Nigeria.”