In December 2025, NNPC Limited signed a five-year forward sale agreement with Leopard Funding Limited. By 31 December 2025, within the same month the agreement was signed, NNPC had drawn the full N3.036 trillion available under the facility, according to NNPC’s audited financial statements for 2025 examined by SecretsReporters.
Against the money, NNPC pledged 61,250 barrels of crude oil per day for the five-year term of the facility. The pledged crude is what goes out across that term, delivered against the borrowing year by year. The statements record a six-month moratorium on the facility, principal repayment begins in June 2026, and no principal had been repaid on it at 31 December 2025.
The facility is priced at three-month Term SOFR plus a margin of 6.25 per cent plus a liquidity premium of 0.50 per cent, according to the statements. The purpose recorded for the borrowing is general corporate purposes. No project, asset or programme is named anywhere in the statements as the use of the money.
No announcement of the signing was made in December 2025. The facility became public only when the audited financial statements were released on 29 September 2026, about nine months after the money was drawn. The statements do not state the exact day in December 2025 on which the agreement was signed, and no public source examined by SecretsReporters states it. The lenders standing behind Leopard Funding Limited are not named in the statements, and the vehicle’s directors and place of incorporation have not been publicly established.
Bayo Ojulari took office as Group Chief Executive Officer of NNPC in April 2025. Project Leopard II was signed in December 2025, on his watch, and it was the second facility NNPC held with the same counterparty. Under the first Leopard facility, signed in December 2024, NNPC paid N420 billion of principal and N305 billion of interest in 2025, with repayments running from June 2025, according to the statements. The Leopard II drawdown took NNPC’s total forward sale contract liabilities, across all of its crude facilities, to N8,249,854 million at 31 December 2025.
Project Gazelle Under Ojulari
N1.2 trillion. That is the principal NNPC repaid on Project Gazelle in 2025 alone, and N2.81 trillion was still owed on the same facility at 31 December 2025, according to the audited financial statements.
The facility is a five-year forward sale agreement of N5.1 trillion with Project Gazelle Funding Limited, signed in December 2023, secured on 90,000 barrels per day of crude oil from production sharing contract assets. NNPC had drawn N4.9 trillion on the facility by the end of 2024, and repayment is made in deliveries of crude. Repayment in crude began in June 2024, and N991 billion worth of crude was lifted in repayment during 2024, according to NNPC’s 2024 financial statements.
Ojulari took charge with the facility fully drawn and its crude repayment schedule already running. The principal repaid in 2025 took cumulative repayments on the facility to N2.09 trillion, and the pledged crude kept flowing to the lenders.
Ojulari has confirmed in his own words that the facility remains live under him. Presenting the 2025 results in Abuja on 29 September 2026, he said, “Specifically, Project Gazelle is still on,” as reported by BusinessDay in October 2026. He formally presented the audited financial statements to President Bola Tinubu at the Presidential Villa on 12 October 2026, alongside the Group Chief Financial Officer, Dapo Segun. The statements carry an unmodified audit opinion from PricewaterhouseCoopers, signed on 28 September 2026.
The crude pledged under Project Gazelle is Federation crude. Deal documents reported by BusinessDay show the facility is backed by royalty oil and tax oil from production sharing contracts, the Federation’s own share of production. NNPC’s statements record what the money raised against that crude was used for. The funding, the statements say, was utilised by the Federal Government on behalf of the Federation, applied as advance payment of taxes and royalties on production sharing contract assets.
Under Ojulari, Project Gazelle was not wound down. It was serviced through 2025, the balance still stands, and the crude committed to it remains committed.
Where the Money Sits
Note 37.4.1 of NNPC’s 2025 audited financial statements carries a line titled payables held in trust, N6,525,412 million. Inside that single line sits a Project Gazelle balance. The note does not state the amount of the Gazelle balance, and no other note in the statements splits it out, according to the financial statements examined by SecretsReporters.
The same statements show where the cash architecture of the deal sits. Note 27 records restricted cash of N3,405,396 million at 31 December 2025, of which N3,244,937 million is described as external funding, cash restricted for funding contractual obligations. That restricted cash is the escrow and reserve structure standing behind NNPC’s forward sale facilities, including Project Gazelle, and it is separate from the cash NNPC reports as available to the business.
The counterparty on the other side of the arrangement is Project Gazelle Funding Limited, an orphan special purpose vehicle incorporated in the Bahamas, as reported by BusinessDay and Peoples Daily in January 2024 and in a deal post-mortem published by Seven Gates Research in October 2026. The directors of the vehicle have not been publicly established in any source examined by SecretsReporters, and NNPC’s statements do not name them.
One institution sits in every seat on the lending side. The African Export-Import Bank, Afreximbank, listed its own roles in a press release dated 6 June 2024: Mandated Lead Arranger, Technical and Modelling Bank, Bookrunner, Facility Agent, Offshore Account Bank, Intercreditor Agent and Collateral Agent. The bank that arranged the facility also holds the offshore accounts and holds the collateral.
Behind the vehicle, the lenders and crude off-takers reported at the time were Vitol, Guvnor, Sahara Energy, Oando and United Bank for Africa, which took $100 million, according to NNPC’s Chief Corporate Communications Officer, Femi Soneye, in a briefing reported in January 2024. In June 2024, a further $925 million was disbursed under an accordion from a consortium of crude oil off-taker lenders including the Oando Group and Sahara Energy Resource Limited, according to Afreximbank.
Deal documents reported by TheCable and BusinessDay describe how the money moves once crude is sold. Up to 90 per cent of the price balance on the crude is released to the sponsor’s nominee accounts at the Central Bank of Nigeria, and 10 per cent is applied to prepayment of the facility.
Under Ojulari, the position recorded in the 2025 statements remains the same: a Bahamas vehicle with unnamed directors, restricted external funding cash locked in escrow, and a Gazelle balance inside the payables held in trust that NNPC does not split out.
The Cost of the Crude Deals
NNPC’s audited financial statements for 2025 recorded N686.94 billion paid in interest on the forward sale facilities. The figure is 171 per cent above the N253.14 billion paid in 2024, according to an analysis of the audited statements published by BrandIconImage on 12 October 2026. The statements themselves carry a second charge on the same facilities. Note 14 records premium on contract liability of N827,299 million in 2025, the interest cost of the crude forward sale facilities, inside total finance costs of N2,480,378 million for the year.
The statements do not split the interest and premium charges facility by facility. The exact cost of Project Gazelle alone in 2025 is therefore not stated anywhere in the accounts Ojulari presented, even as principal on that facility was repaid through the year and a balance remained outstanding at the year end.
The price of the Gazelle money was reported when the deal was documented. The all-in rate is 11.85 per cent per annum, built from three-month SOFR plus a margin of 6.0 per cent plus a liquidity premium of 0.5 per cent, according to deal documents reported by TheCable and BusinessDay. The total crude pledged over the tenor of the facility is 164.25 million barrels. TheCable calculated in 2023 that the pledged crude was worth about $12 billion at benchmark prices against a facility of $3.3 billion. TheCable also reported a facilitation fee of 2 per cent, about $66 million. NNPC has not published that fee figure in its financial statements.
Across all of its forward sale facilities, NNPC drew N5.57 trillion in 2025 and repaid N2.76 trillion of principal, according to the BrandIconImage analysis of the statements. Drawdowns in 2025 ran at about twice the principal repaid in the same year.
From April 2025 onward, every crude delivery against the crude pledged under Project Gazelle, and every interest payment on the forward sale book, was made under Ojulari’s authority as Group Chief Executive Officer.
The Law, the Warning and the Audit Demand
“Without adequate public disclosure or parliamentary scrutiny.” That is what state finance commissioners and federal officials recorded about Nigeria’s crude-for-loan deals at the FAAC Post-Mortem retreat in Enugu in February 2026, as reported by BusinessDay and Leadership. The deals under that description include Project Gazelle, the forward sale that Ojulari’s NNPC has continued to service and defend.
The retreat demanded a forensic audit of $8.86 billion of crude-for-loan deals covering 272,500 barrels per day across all deals, 14.66 per cent of Nigeria’s 2025 production, with about N8.36 trillion consumed by servicing before the balance became available for sharing. The communiqué from the retreat described deductions at source as inconsistent with transparency, budgetary discipline and constitutional intent.
Project Gazelle sits at the centre of that constitutional question. Its crude is pledged from royalty oil and tax oil on production sharing contracts, the Federation’s share of production, according to deal documents reported by BusinessDay. Section 162(1) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria requires all revenues collected by the Federal Government to be paid into the Federation Account, and Section 162(3) requires distribution of the balance among the federal, state and local governments. Barrels delivered to Project Gazelle Funding Limited under the pledge are sold and applied to the facility outside that account.
The Petroleum Industry Act 2021 frames the same position. Sections 53 and 54 place NNPC Limited’s shares with the Ministry of Finance Incorporated and the Ministry of Petroleum Incorporated on behalf of the Federation, a position Note 40 of the 2025 financial statements confirms. Section 64 charges NNPC with lifting and selling Federation crude and remitting the proceeds. The forward sale structure pre-sells that crude years ahead of production.
The warning from the International Monetary Fund was published on Ojulari’s watch. In its 2025 Article IV staff report on Nigeria, dated 29 May 2025, the Fund stated that “any preexport financing deal would reduce future revenues,” and defined the risk as preexport financing conducted by NNPC on behalf of the government by pledging future crude oil. The warning predated the signing of Project Leopard II by seven months. Gazelle servicing continued through 2025 after that warning, and in December 2025 NNPC signed the further forward sale and drew the full facility within the month.
In February 2026, the same month the FAAC retreat met, Executive Order 9 suspended the retention of 30 per cent of production sharing contract profit oil in the Frontier Exploration Fund under Section 9 of the Petroleum Industry Act and directed petroleum revenues to the Federation Account, as recorded in Note 43a of the financial statements. The forward sales, which commit pledged crude before it can reach that same account, continued after the order.
Nigeria is an implementing country of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. Requirements 2.6, 4.2, 4.3 and 6.2 of the EITI Standard 2023, and the EITI guidance note on resource-backed loans, expect disclosure of the parties to such loans, the nature and value of the collateral pledged, the process by which the lenders were selected, whether parliament ratified the borrowing and how the loan is treated in public debt. None of NNPC’s forward sale facilities appears in the public debt stock published by the Debt Management Office, and none was laid before the National Assembly for ratification. Under Ojulari, Project Gazelle remains on, and the forensic audit demanded in February 2026 has not been published.
Gazelle 2
In August 2026, the National Economic Council took up the future of Project Gazelle. The proposal before the council was a refinancing of the crude-backed facility, with new money drawn on top of the old debt. The council approved it, Reuters reported, through a new facility of $4.5 billion.
The refinancing covers about $1.5 billion still outstanding on Project Gazelle and unlocks about $3 billion of new liquidity, according to the Reuters report, carried by Businessfront and TimesLive in August 2026 and based on a presidency statement. The volume of crude pledged falls by about 12.5 per cent to about 78,750 barrels per day. The Minister of Finance told the council the terms of the new facility are more favourable than the original, according to the presidency statement. The lenders behind the $4.5 billion facility were not named in the Reuters report or in the presidency statement, and the full agreement has not been published.
The approval came six months after state and federal officials at the FAAC Post-Mortem retreat demanded a forensic audit of the crude-for-loan deals, and six months after Executive Order 9 directed petroleum revenues into the Federation Account.
Gazelle 2 is a decision of Ojulari’s tenure as Group Chief Executive Officer. It extends crude-backed borrowing against production sharing contract crude rather than winding the structure down.
Across the three forward sale facilities on NNPC’s books at 31 December 2025, 186,250 barrels per day of crude stood committed, according to the financial statements. Project Gazelle carried the largest single pledge in that structure. Under the refinancing approved in August 2026, the Gazelle pledge continues at a reduced daily volume, on terms the presidency describes as more favourable, with the model Ojulari inherited in April 2025 expanded, first by the Leopard II drawdown of December 2025 and then by Gazelle 2.
Source: SecretsReporter