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A US federal courtroom has ordered a Nigerian businessman, who final 12 months sought to purchase the English soccer membership Sheffield United, to pay greater than $250mn in fines and barred him from serving as a director of a public firm.
Final 12 months, the US Securities and Change Fee had charged Dozy Mmobuosi and three of his firms, together with two Nasdaq-listed enterprises, with fraud for inflating the “monetary efficiency metrics of his firms and key working subsidiaries to defraud buyers worldwide”.
Choose Jesse M Furman, of the US District Court docket for the Southern District of New York, has now entered a final judgment by default towards Mmobuosi and his firms after the entrepreneur didn’t make any representations within the civil criticism filed final December by the SEC.
The decide wrote that Mmobuosi and his firms, Tingo Group, Agri-Fintech Holdings and Tingo Worldwide Holdings, had “didn’t reply, plead, or in any other case defend” themselves within the case.
Mmobuosi and his three US-based entities have been ordered to pay greater than $250mn in fines after the SEC alleged that his empire was a “fiction”.
Tingo, a fintech group, claimed it had greater than 9mn prospects in Nigeria, most of whom have been farmers, and that it had a meals processing enterprise.
The SEC mentioned in final 12 months’s criticism that the “purported property, revenues, bills, prospects and suppliers” of Mmobuosi’s Tingo group have been all “nearly solely fabricated” and that the size of the fraud on the enterprise was “staggering”.
Tingo Cellular reported money and money equivalents of $461.7mn for 2022 in its Nigerian financial institution accounts, however the SEC mentioned its steadiness was lower than $50.
Hindenburg, the US-based brief vendor, solid doubts on the viability of the enterprise final 12 months, calling it an “exceptionally apparent rip-off” in a report that despatched Tingo’s inventory costs plummeting greater than 60 per cent on the day of its launch.
The fees filed final 12 months got here a month after the SEC halted the buying and selling within the shares of Nasdaq-listed Tingo Group and Agri-Fintech Holdings over what the company described as “questions and considerations relating to the adequacy and accuracy of publicly out there info”.
The entrepreneur shot into the limelight final 12 months when he launched an audacious bid to purchase Sheffield United, a Yorkshire-based membership that performed within the English Premier League final 12 months and is now within the second tier of English soccer.
Mmobuosi and his firms couldn’t be instantly reached for remark.
