WorldStage– Oando Nigeria Plc has again announced that it would miss filing of its 2025 audited financial statement (AFS) on May 29.
The announcement came 120 days after Oando’s financial year end, and 60 days after the March 31 extension the Nigeria Exchange Group (NGX) grants listed companies to comply.
According to a statement by the company secretary Folashade Ibidapo-Obe, the acquisition of Nigeria Agip Oil Company was the reason for defaulting this year.
The same excuse was given last year for missing the deadline for the previous year. The acquisition took place in 2024, though.
Oando, Nigeria’s major indigenous oil producer, has missed filing its financials seven times since 2015. And its excuses have ranged from blaming the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), and auditors to business expansion.
But the reasons, at times, usually break through the layers of excuses to reveal themselves. Struggles to tell shareholders it loses money, cooking the books, sanctions for non-compliance, and others have mostly pushed the company to miss regulatory filings.
Below is the timeline of Oando’s non-compliance with regulatory filings since 2015.
In 2015, the Nigeria Stock Exchange denounced Oando’s late filing of its 2014 financial results. It turned out it was the year of its biggest loss: N130 billion loss in exploration; N36 billion loss in services; and N19 billion loss in forex transactions.
Many shareholders and investors got their fingers burnt before the loss disclosure which Oando Group’s CEO Wale Tinubu described as “impairments”.
SEC had to hit the company with a N6.2 million fine.
On April 1, 2016, Oando announced it missed the March 31 deadline to file its 2015 AFS . According to a statement by company secretary then, Ayotola Jagun, the company had completed the document, but its auditor Ernst &Young said the Federal Reporting Council of Nigeria (FRCN) had to review it. Regulators always do. But Oando still made an excuse of that—because the external auditor recommended it.
March 2, 2018, the year after snitches blew the whistle on Oando
By March 2, 2018, Oando stated it would miss the Mach 31 deadline. Eason: The FRCN wanted to look deeply into the company’s books.
Two whistleblowers had petitioned the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2017 over Oando’s financial statement shenanigans. Allegations eventually bred confrontations (legal), and the regulator suspended trading of Oando’s stock in May 2019.
Investigations revealed what SEC in a July 15, 2021 press release described as “serous infractions such as false disclosures, market abuse, misstatements in financial statements, internal control failure, and corporate governance lapse.”
After racking up more regulatory filing defaults, Oando blinked first and approached SEC for an out of-court settlement in 2021.
About 120 days after it missed filing its 2019 AFS, and Quarter 1, 2020 unaudited financial statement, Oando disclosed it still would not be able to release the documents.
Its reason was that SEC had suspended the company’s annual general meeting (AGM). And Oando insisted the suspension hindered the submission of the 2018 AFS for shareholders’ approval, and for their appointment of an auditor for the 2019.
A company’s board audit committee and the statutory audit committee in conjunction with the external auditor have the audit functions, not an AGM, according to the FRCN code of corporate governance. Shareholders only appoint auditors at AGMs.
With a backlog of AFS and quarterly reports to file, and a change of external auditor, Oando schedule the releases of the 2020, 2021, and 2022 AFS between February and August that year.
The peace-meal approach had its own excuse.
Oando said the “lengthy onboarding process required for new external auditor [OBD Professional Services] and the complexity of auditing the several companies that make up the group”
The company eventually carried over the 2022 AFS filing it scheduled for August 2023 to April the following year.
October 24, 2024: Earlier AFS default took Oando’s share off NSE
Oando’s “lengthy” onboarding of its auditor that extended to about the third quarter of 2023 spared no time for the year’s AFS. It said it began preparing the document in April 2024, though.
But by October, seven months after the March 31 deadline for regulatory filing, the company had to disclose the suspension of its shares on the NGX.
April 3, 2025, company’s earlier expansion became a problem
After the March 31 deadline, Oando pleaded again it would only be able to file the last AFS by May.
The excuse for the failure came from the Agip acquisition in 2024. It stated in a release that “accounting for the acquisition and expanded internal control” got in the way.
As it flunked the deadline for filing its 2025 audited report, Oando again dusted up its earlier cover story: Agip acquisition and account integration.
Its statement last week further indicated all still depends on FRCN’s approval by the June 12 new deadline Oando set for itself.
