The Nigerian office of Minerva Group, the main financial backer of a $2.5bn bid for Nitel, the former monopoly in one of the world’s hottest telecoms markets, is hard to find.
The Financial Times failed to locate it at an address given by a person who had visited it, at the bottom of an unpaved close in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital. Reached by phone, Juliette Ndenge-Che, Minerva’s West Africa representative, refused to comment until the approval process was complete. “After that we can answer questions,” she said.
Minerva was named earlier this month as part of a bidding consortium for Nitel alongside China Unicom, China’s second-biggest telecoms operator, and GiCell, a small local telecoms company.
The winning consortium, called New Generation Telecommunications, described Minerva as its “financial backbone”.
According to its own profile sent to potential customers, marked “confidential” but a copy of which was obtained by the FT, “Minerva Group is not only the biggest but also one of the most reliable financing partnership and fund management services providers to the global market from the Middle East”.
Yet Nigerian bankers and business people have struggled to track the group down to its Dubai headquarters. It does not appear to have a website. E-mails from the FT went unanswered.
“I don’t have any information on that,” said the woman who answered Minerva’s Dubai phone number when asked about the Nitel bid.
Since it liberalised its market in 2001 Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, has proved highly attractive to telecoms groups. It is the jewel of Kuwait-based Zain’s African assets – the subject of a $10.7bn offer from India’s Bharti Airtel – accounting for one-fifth of group subscribers.
Meanwhile, Nitel has withered. Starved of investment, its share of the mobile market has shrunk to less than 1 per cent, according to official data. Previous attempted privatisations have foundered.
But it owns valuable property and infrastructure that could be lucrative if revived. Its licence provides an entry to a huge, if increasingly competitive, market.
Nonetheless, when details of the latest bids for 75 per cent of Nitel were announced, there was consternation. The victorious bid was $1.5bn more than the second-highest offer and five times the valuation placed on the company by two other potential bidders.
China Unicom initially denied it was involved. But when confronted with a letter from its European arm saying it was willing to be technical partner to New Generation and to consider a 20 per cent stake in Nitel, it confirmed its European subsidiary was “in contact with potential bidders”.
Usman Gumi, chief executive of GiCell and the frontman of the consortium, declined to comment but said he hoped the privatisation council – which is chaired by Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria’s acting president – would meet to consider the bid next week.
Minerva said in a January 19 letter to Mr Gumi, released by the Nigerian authorities, that it intended to acquire an equity share of the consortium which would be equivalent to a 51 per cent holding in a privatised Nitel.
“We are willing and able to provide the total capital commitment in equity towards the acquisition and operation of the new Nitel,” Minerva wrote, adding that it could “also provide a loan up to and in excess of $5bn”.
In its profile, Minerva says that “all financing is done only through prime banks”.
If the bid is approved, the consortium would have 10 days to find a 30 per cent downpayment – or $750m – and a further 50 days to pay the balance.
Yet such is the confusion surrounding the bid that many doubt the decade-long saga of Nitel’s privatisation is at an end.