A US federal court has ordered a Nigerian businessman, Dozy Mmobuosi who last year sought to buy the English football club Sheffield United, to pay more than $250m in fines and barred him from serving as a director of a public company.
Last year, the US Securities and Exchange Commission had charged Dozy Mmobuosi and three of his companies, including two Nasdaq-listed enterprises, with fraud for inflating the “financial performance metrics of his companies and key operating subsidiaries to defraud investors worldwide”.
Judge Jesse M Furman, of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, has now entered a final judgment by default against Mmobuosi and his companies after the entrepreneur failed to make any representations in the civil complaint filed last December by the SEC.
The judge wrote that Mmobuosi and his companies, Tingo Group, Agri-Fintech Holdings and Tingo International Holdings, had “failed to answer, plead, or otherwise defend” themselves in the case. Mmobuosi and his three US-based entities have been ordered to pay more than $250mn in fines after the SEC alleged that his empire was a “fiction”.
FINANCIAL TIMES
