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Nigeria/France: Mike Adenuga – ‘This is a strategic relationship’

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This article is part of the dossier:

Nigeria/France: Le Nouveau Chapitre

By Nicholas Norbrook, in Lagos

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Posted on June 28, 2021 12:32

The founder of Glo and Conoil Mike Adenuga credits several of his successes in business to partnerships with French firms

Telecoms and energy businessman Mike Adenuga says he has leant on French technology partners to build his fortune. “Our relationship with French business has been a long and extremely beneficial one,” he says.

It started in the early 1990s, after Adenuga’s Consolidated Oil struck commercial quantities of crude in Ondo State.

“The genesis and bedrock of that relationship was the energy team at the Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP) Paris office, led by Guillaume Leenhardt. A great deal of our early success can be attributed to the professionalism, customer orientation and creativity of that team,” says Adenuga. “We worked extremely hard and well together to meet some ridiculously tight deadlines – working through the night till 6am only to resume work again at 8am after a quick nap and shower! Those are days I remember with a lot of fondness.”

It is telecoms, however, for which Adenuga is

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