Published 20th Mar, 2024

By Timileyin Akinmoyeje

Omotsho Olamide (not real name) was returning from a church service in Texas in 2017 when she met another Nigerian. She recalled the circumstances of their meeting as very ordinary. The man, who introduced himself as Henry, had casually strolled up to the elevator she was using and struck up a conversation about church.

This otherwise fateful meeting would blossom into a committed communication that ceased temporarily in 2017 and was eventually reignited in the heat of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. In March 2020, Henry contacted Olamide to ask for money. Henry told Olamide that he needed a loan to sort out a contract that his firm was awarded back home in Nigeria.

Meanwhile, when they first met in 2017, he told Olamide that he was the Chief Executive Officer of Gasstream Asset Management, a subsidiary of Burj Petroleum Corporation. This corporation, according to FIJ’s findings, belongs to late Bin Salman Bin Ali Al Khalifa, a former prime minister of Bahrain.

To assure Olamide that he would refund her, Henry sent her what looked like contract and invoice request documents belonging to an asset management firm.

Olamide, in good faith and under the impression that she would get a refund, lent him $1,000 at first. This amount would, however, snowball into about $40,000 from different instances of lending for project and personal reasons.

At the time, she believed it was only natural that Henry was short on money to sort out personal expenses when his business was suffering a downtime. As a result, she would cover seemingly mundane expenses like his telephone bills.

A cheque of $3,000 issued to Henry Henry

“He needed loan money during the pandemic, when things were going bad for his project. He had told me he had a wheel field and all this other stuff in process. For someone that I had known years before that time, it was not too difficult to get me to empathise with him,” she said.

“The contract documents and the other paperwork that you’d consider confidential information were the straw that broke the camel’s back. I thought to help him and we agreed that he would pay back my money when his project was sorted.

“Mind you, what he did wasn’t one-off borrowing. But for someone with whom I’d kept in touch for so long, I didn’t imagine he was going to act funny. There were days I paid his telephone bills and sorted his accommodation. I loaned him money for different reasons, too, between that time in 2020 and late 2021.”

In 2022, when Olamide suspected that Henry’s projects would have been successfully sorted, she requested a refund of some of her money per Henry’s promise. She told FIJ that it began as friendly reminders to him on a relatively consistent basis that her refund was due. But what she got instead of a refund were excuses, which at first she believed.

“I started asking for a refund of the heavier bills, the ones I considered loans to him, sometime in 2022. You know, it was supposed to be friendly reminders that he should pay, but I kept getting excuses in the same tone,” she said.

“When my request for a refund or at least a time commitment began to get serious, he would avoid my calls, avoid my texts and disappear for days. He would then reappear with some excuses, which sometimes looked genuine and, at other times, appeared poorly cooked.

“At one point, he blamed the exchange rate; at others, he told me his Rangerover was damaged. He even told me that his parents had cancer at some point and he claimed his payment was delayed, too, on the contracts he was working on. Different excuses.”

Olamide told FIJ that towards the end of 2022, she was almost sure Henry was not willing to refund him. As a result, she took the refund request a notch higher and sent emails to Gasstreams Asset Management, the company Henry claimed he oversaw.

“That got his attention again. He reached out to me after I sent a mail to his company. He didn’t make any commitment in cash; he promised again that he would refund me. He sent an email saying that his company instructed him to tell me when my money would be refunded and he promised to refund it by the end of September 2022,” said Olamide.

As of the time of this report, however, she had not got any refund whatsoever from Henry. She told FIJ that she had begun to consider the possibility that she had been swindled for good.

FIJ dug into the details of the company in line with the assumption that it could have been made up and found that Burj Petroleum, the parent company, and Gasstream Asset Management, the subsidiary, are duly registered in Nigeria.

On March 12, FIJ wrote to the two organisations to find their affiliations with Henry and confirm if they were aware of the commitment he made with their names on the line.

None of the organisations had responded at press time. FIJ also sent texts to Henry through his social media channels, including email, on the same day. At press time, none of these had been responded to.

Olamide wants to recover her money. She told FIJ that she would involve Nigerian anti-graft agencies if necessary to recover it.

Share on Social Media