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On 4 October 2016, Nana Fatima Otedola walked into the High Court of Justice of the Virgin Islands and did what billionaire wives almost never do in the open: she took her husband’s offshore company to court.
The respondent was Hampshire Venture Property Holdings Limited, the British Virgin Islands company that the 2021 Pandora Papers reporting identified as a vehicle of her husband, Femi Otedola, the FirstHoldCo chairman. The claim number was BVIHCV 268 of 2016. The judge was Justice Gerhard Wallbank. The application was filed that same morning, supported by two affidavits sworn the same day, one by Nana herself and one by a man named Dickon Ceadel, and argued by Robert Nader of the Tortola law firm Forbes Hare.
By the time the Registrar’s stamp came down on 5 October, the court had given her what she asked for. The court order was exclusively obtained by SecretsReporters.
Until 26 October 2016 or further order, Hampshire Venture, by itself or through its directors, officers, employees or agents, or in any other way, was forbidden from increasing the borrowing secured against Flat 5.3, 19 Trevor Square, London SW7 1DZ, registered at HM Land Registry under title number NGL836266, by drawing down on any borrowing facility with Standard Chartered Bank or any other lender secured against the property.
The order carried the BVI court’s standard penal notice, and it is worth reading slowly: if Hampshire Venture failed to comply, it could be held in contempt of court and be liable to imprisonment or fine, with its assets seized. Any other person who knew of the order and helped breach it faced the same fate.
A wife had gone to an offshore court and put her husband’s company on a leash over a London flat.
## The flat in the middle
19 Trevor Square sits in Knightsbridge, one of London’s most expensive postcodes, and the order reveals something the public record had never shown: which exact door of the Otedola property empire this fight was about. Flat 5.3.
The address is not new to this family. Corporate filings in the United Kingdom show that Nana Otedola’s own company, Fineshade Energy (UK) Limited, is registered at Apartment 53, 19 Trevor Square. She was not restraining some distant asset she had never seen. She was locking down a building in her own orbit, and, on the evidence of the order, she believed the company holding the flat was about to load it with debt.
The four-page order leaves one loud fact hanging over the Otedolas: a man’s wife needed a judge’s order to stop his company borrowing against a flat. The affidavits that persuaded Justice Wallbank to grant the restraint would contain the reason. They are not public. What happened at the return hearing is not public either.
## The Standard Chartered thread
One name in the order will be familiar to anyone who followed the Pandora Papers. The court specifically fenced off borrowing facilities with Standard Chartered Bank, the same banking group at the centre of the 2021 revelations that Hampshire Venture and a related Otedola vehicle, the Fenman 2 Settlement, kept US$34.4 million with Standard Chartered in Jersey.
The order is an interim order. It records no finding of wrongdoing against Femi Otedola, against Hampshire Venture, or against any other person, and it gives no reasons for the restraint. Interim orders of this kind are made to hold a position until a return hearing, on the judge being persuaded that there is a serious issue to be tried and that the balance of convenience favours keeping things as they are until then.
Source: …Secretsreporters