Exclusive: How Premium Trust Bank MD Emefienim And Wife Priscilla Secretly Grabbed 38% of The Bank Through Their Marginal Energy SPV

Secrets Reporters

Start with the date: March 31, 2023. On that day, a filing was made on a Warri company called Marginal Energy. It declared two persons with significant control. One of them was Emefienim Priscilla Ifeoma. She had never been a director of the company. She had never appeared in its filings. Sixteen years after the company was born, she simply arrived – as the declared controller of the vehicle that would take 37.90 percent of Premium Trust Bank.

This is the file, exhibit by exhibit. Secrets Reporters’ findings are stated here exactly as the records carry them.

The company

Marginal Energy Limited is registered as RC-687587, active on the CAC register, incorporated in April 2007, addressed at Block 2, Edewor Shopping Centre, Effurun, Warri, Delta State. Its directors are named as Ifeoma Amaka Egwu, Fortune Ewere Iduwe and Theophilus Uwaoma. Its secretary is named as Odediran Odediran Olayemi Grace. Nothing about it suggests a bank owner. That is the point of a vehicle.

On March 31, 2023, the filings show two persons with significant control declared: Esan Olayemi and Emefienim Priscilla Ifeoma. No directorship, no prior appearance but just one declaration, and the wife of the bank’s managing director stood as controller of the vehicle. Two published profiles identify Premium Trust’s managing director, Emmanuel Efe Emefienim, as married to a Priscilla Emefienim. 

His own name is absent from the vehicle’s filings entirely, not as director, not as officer, not as controller. He holds 2,531,225,000 Premium Trust shares which is 3.34% in his own name, alongside the vehicle his wife was made to control.

The shares

The bank’s audited FY2025 records report N178.65 billion in total share proceeds from its capital raise, at an implied issue price of about N3.583 per share. In those records, Marginal Energy moved from zero shares to 28.75 billion which amounts to 37.90%, the single largest shareholding in the institution, taken up in the 2024 raise. No press coverage of the stake has been found anywhere. It is not a majority on paper. In a widely held bank, 37.90% in one hand does not need to be.

What the law says

CAMA law is blunt on this, that every holder of 5 percent or more must disclose whether the holding is beneficial or nominee. Concealment draws inactive marking, court fines and two years’ imprisonment for the officers under the PSC Regulations. 

BOFIA puts significant acquisitions under CBN approval and the CBN holds the hammer for acquisitions built on hidden ownership: sanctions, removal of directors, and in the extreme, loss of the licence. 

For the EFCC, sections 6 and 7 of its Act give the mandate: investigate, identify the persons involved, trace the funds behind the 37.90 percent, name the true owners, and take the evidence to court. The money-laundering law demands that the true owner be known and verified; hiding the owner is not a technicality but can be argued is an offence.