“$5m Swiss School Fees Scandal?” NMDPRA Boss Farouk Ahmed Fires Back, Dares EFCC, CCB To Probe His Finances

By Passman Akpos

The Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA), Engr. Farouk Ahmed, has issued a detailed public response to allegations that he spent about $5 million on the secondary education of his children in Switzerland, dismissing the claims as misleading, poorly contextualised and detached from the realities of his long public service career.

In a statement released on Tuesday, Ahmed said he was compelled to respond not out of fear of scrutiny, but because of what he described as the calculated timing of the allegations and their failure to reflect his professional trajectory and lawful sources of income over more than three decades in Nigeria’s petroleum sector.

Ahmed traced his career to 1991, when he joined the then Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) through a competitive civil service examination. He said he rose steadily from a junior engineer to the head of the NMDPRA through “merit and competence, not political patronage.”

According to him, his early career was spent in highly technical units, including crude oil marketing, gas supply monitoring and downstream operations, where decisions are driven by engineering standards, market dynamics and regulatory frameworks rather than political influence.

By 2012, Ahmed said he had become General Manager of the Crude Oil Marketing Division, overseeing one of Nigeria’s most critical revenue streams during a period marked by volatile global oil prices. In 2015, he was appointed Deputy Director, assuming broader downstream regulatory responsibilities amid fuel scarcity and pricing disputes.

He noted that his appointment as NMDPRA CEO in 2021 came with a clear mandate to implement the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) transparently and without favour, acknowledging that such reforms would inevitably unsettle entrenched interests that benefitted from decades of opacity in the oil and gas sector.

Addressing the education funding allegations directly, Ahmed said reports suggesting that he personally paid $5 million for his children’s secondary education were inaccurate. He disclosed that three of his four children received merit-based scholarships covering between 40 and 65 per cent of tuition costs, stressing that these claims were verifiable by authorised investigators.

He further revealed that his late father, whom he described as a Northern Nigerian businessman, established education trust funds for his grandchildren before his death in 2018, in keeping with long-standing family and cultural practices of collective investment in education.

“When scholarships, family contributions and my own savings accumulated over three decades are properly accounted for, my personal financial obligation was entirely consistent with someone of my professional standing,” Ahmed said.

He added that his annual compensation as NMDPRA CEO, estimated at about ₦48 million including allowances, is publicly disclosed in audited reports. According to him, this income, combined with long-term savings, cooperative investments available to civil servants and family support, made the education expenses feasible without recourse to corruption.

Ahmed also disclosed that he has consistently submitted annual asset declarations to the Code of Conduct Bureau since entering public service and has authorised the educational institutions attended by his children to release relevant financial records to Nigerian authorities conducting any investigation.

On the regulatory front, the NMDPRA chief suggested that the renewed focus on the allegations coincided with stricter enforcement actions by the authority. These include tighter licensing requirements, exposure of substandard petroleum products and initiatives aimed at improving transparency in pricing, supply and distribution.

He rejected claims that recent import licensing approvals amounted to “economic sabotage,” insisting that the Petroleum Industry Act obliges the regulator to guarantee supply security and prevent scarcity, particularly when domestic supply is inadequate.

“A single-source supply model creates dangerous vulnerabilities that no responsible regulator can ignore,” Ahmed stated.

Since 2021, he said, the NMDPRA has introduced several reforms, including the publication of monthly supply reports, the creation of public data portals, depot-to-station tracking systems to curb product diversion and uniform enforcement of fuel quality standards nationwide.

In what he described as an “invitation to investigation,” Ahmed formally requested the Code of Conduct Bureau to review all his asset declarations dating back to 1991. He also called on the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to scrutinise his financial transactions and urged the National Assembly to exercise its constitutional oversight over any allegations of regulatory compromise.

He pledged full cooperation with any probe, provided it is conducted professionally and free from preconceived conclusions driven by commercial or political interests.

“If the price of regulatory independence is personal attacks and manufactured scandals, I accept that price,” Ahmed said, adding that he would neither abandon his statutory duties nor grant preferential treatment to any individual or company.

The allegations, which circulated widely on social media and were attributed to a statement signed by billionaire businessman Aliko Dangote, claimed that Ahmed spent over $5 million on the Swiss secondary education of his four children—Faisal Farouk, Farouk Jr., Ashraf Farouk and Farhana Farouk—across institutions including Montreux School, Aiglon College, Institut Le Rosey and La Garenne International School.

The document also estimated additional millions of dollars spent on tertiary education abroad, including an MBA programme at Harvard University.

Ahmed, however, insisted that “facts stripped of context can be deeply misleading,” expressing confidence that both his financial records and professional conduct would withstand independent scrutiny.

He concluded by stating that the reforms being implemented by the NMDPRA are in Nigeria’s long-term interest, even if they generate short-term friction with powerful stakeholders.