OML 42: a company from his record at the centre of a billion-dollar receivership fight

What has happened to the company

Neconde Energy Limited holds an interest in OML 42, an onshore oil mining lease in the Niger Delta. The Federal Government of Nigeria holds 55 per cent of the joint venture and is its operator.

On 15 October 2025, FBNQuest Merchant Bank Limited and First Trustees Limited went before Justice Dehinde Dipeolu at the Federal High Court in Lagos on an ex parte motion. Five days later it was filed. The court froze the bank accounts, the shares and the assets of Nestoil Limited, of Neconde Energy Limited and of other Nestoil affiliates, across every Nigerian financial institution — Mareva orders, coupled with a receivership.

The claims behind them exceed USD 1.01 billion and NGN 430 billion. ThisDay described them as unverified.

The lenders who objected

What followed is unusual. Four institutions that had actually lent Neconde money — Glencore Energy UK Limited, Fidelity Bank Plc, Mauritius Commercial Bank Limited and the Africa Finance Corporation — went to court to have the freezing orders undone.

Through Olufemi Oyewole (SAN), these Senior Lenders told the court that the orders threatened their own security, and made two specific complaints. First, that the plaintiffs had not disclosed to the judge the existence of a Senior Secured Medium-Term Facility Agreement of 27 April 2016, under which Neconde had drawn a USD 640 million syndicated loan. Second, that the Deed of Charge of 8 December 2022, on which the whole ex parte application rested, was registered against Nestoil Limited only — not against Neconde.

Neconde, for its part, called its inclusion in the orders wrongful, oppressive and a clear case of judicial overreach.

The suit that was dropped

On 23 November 2025 Neconde, White Dove Shipping Company Limited and four other plaintiffs opened a second front in Abuja, before Justice Mohammed Umar. They sued NUPRC, the petroleum regulator, along with four commercial banks, Afreximbank and three other companies.

Their complaint was narrow and pointed: could the regulator, by a letter of 15 October 2025 bearing reference NUPRC/LD/CPL/2839/Vol.2/2025/94, allow a charge holder’s agents to take over the operations of a joint venture majority-owned and operated by the Federal Government — when the charges in question had not crystallised and the assets were still running?

The court never answered. On 17 February 2026 Neconde signed a notice of discontinuance against the regulator, announced in open court that April by counsel M. Ogwuche, who said only that the plaintiffs “found it pertinent to discontinue against the NUPRC at this time after a careful review of the whole matter.” NUPRC’s counsel, Wale Balogun (SAN), told the court the Commission had no objection.

Where Madnani sits in this

He does not. He is not a plaintiff, not a defendant, not named in any of the reporting on any of these proceedings. Nothing here is an allegation against him, and this archive makes none.

What is on the record is narrower and worth stating precisely: Neconde Energy Limited appears on his published list of former non-executive directorships. The company on which he served in that capacity is now the subject of a receivership and asset freeze over claims exceeding a billion dollars, contested by its own senior lenders on the ground that the charge relied upon was registered against a different company.

That is a fact about the company. It is recorded here because the company is on his record — the same reason every other entity on this site is.

What is missing

The dates. His profiles state the role and give no period for it. Without them a reader cannot know whether his tenure touched the 2016 facility, the 2022 deed of charge, or neither. This archive has not found a filing that supplies them, and says so rather than guessing.