Nigerian born ‘billionaire’ Dozy Mmobuosi has embarked on a massive image laundering drive, in an attempt to win back the hearts of many of his admirers, Nigerians in particular. The embattled techpreneur, who was recently in the news for fabricating business, educational claims, has found a way to penetrate Nigeria’s health care sector with the opening of a diagnostic centre called Equity Specialist Clinics and Diagnostic Centre.
Located in the Lekki area of Lagos, the medical facility reportedly offers purely medical and diagnostic services. As with most of his widely touted questionable investments, the diagnostic centre has no website or anything on the internet to better explain what it is all about.
A search on the Internet throws up job recruitment websites seeking to recruit just one staff for the diagnostic centre. Other searches throw up another website of a well established diagnostic centre bearing partially the same name with his own diagnostic centre but based in Nairobi with several franchise locations within the Eastern African country.
Dozy, who claims to be an advocate of technological advancement in Africa, is the founder and CEO of Tingo Inc., a publicly traded company on the OTC Markets Group which is headquartered in New Jersey, United States of America and claims to have several business segments focused on providing mobile phones, food processing and an online food marketplace for farmers primarily located in Nigeria.
He first came to public knowledge in February when it was reported that he was close to completing a £90 million takeover of English football club Sheffield United. But in June, an investigation by Hindenburg Research revealed that his entity called Tingo Group, is nothing but an exceptionally obvious scam with completely fabricated financials.
Hindenburg Research in its comprehensive report noted that it identified major red flags with Dozy’s background. He appeared to have fabricated his biographical claim to have developed the first mobile payment app in Nigeria. He claimed in his biography to have received a PhD in rural advancement from a Malaysian university, UPM, in 2007 but that claim was also found to be false because when Hindenburg Research contacted UPM to verify the degree, the school wrote back and said no one by his name was found in its verification system.
In 2017, Dozy was arrested and faced an eight-count indictment over the issuance of bad cheques, according to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. He later settled the case in arbitration.
In 2019, Dozy who is reportedly worth £7 billion, claimed to have launched Tingo Airlines and posted social media messages encouraging customers to fly with Tingo Airlines. It was later discovered that Tingo photoshopped its logo onto pictures of aeroplanes.
The report also revealed that Tingo’s food division claimed to generate $577.2 million in revenue last quarter alone, representing 68 per cent of total reported revenue, exceeding those of every major comparable food company. Yet, Tingo has no food processing facility of its own. Earlier in the year, Tingo Food held a groundbreaking ceremony for a planned $1.6 billion food processing facility, attended by the then agriculture minister Mohammad Mahmood Abubakar and other politicians.
It turned out that the rendering of the planned facility, featured in Tingo’s investor materials and on a billboard at the ceremony, was actually a rendering of an oil refinery from a stock photo website. Up till today, there is no sign of progress for the proposed food processor.
Tingo Group claimed that its mobile handset leasing, call and data segments generated $128 million in revenue last quarter. It also claims members of two unnamed farming co-ops supply the majority of its 9 million user base, consisting of local Nigerian farmers who supposedly form the core of the company’s phone customers and provide ag products used in Tingo’s food and trading businesses. But no one seems to have heard of anything called Tingo Mobile just as checks with the Nigerian Communications Commission showed it has no record of Tingo being a mobile licensee at all, despite licensing requirements and the company’s claim to have 12+ million mobile customers.
The report also said that despite claiming to have millions of farmers using its phones, Tingo Mobile’s corporate presentation and webpage use stock photos of farmers using phones and Tingo Mobile’s office in Nigeria, has only a handful of employees and a sign posted on its door by federal tax authorities stating that the company is delinquent on its tax obligations.
There are several other instances of insincerity with his business dealings, but Dozy however begs to differ. He denied the fraud allegations describing it as malicious, misleading and baseless accusations while also emphasizing on the accuracy of its accounting records.
He denounced the report suggesting that it was a deliberate attempt to undermine the positive work being done by Tingo Group in various global markets. According to him, there is evidence to support its authenticity, including business licenses from the relevant authorities.
About the Author
