Exclusive: Works Minister David Umahi Conspired With Perm Sec Rafiu Adeladan To Wire N9.3 Billion To An Advertising Agency For Road Contract

Secrets Reporters 

Agelink Network Limited, RC 426726, is an advertising agency on paper with its entire documented government-contract history solely in Ebonyi State under Umahi’s governorship, where it supplied hospital blocks, exercise books and LED fittings. That is all SecretsReporters found out about the company until Umahi got into Abuja.

Then something happened when the sum of N9,291,529,018.67 hit its bank account on 25 February 2025 as an “EC NO.1 – ADVANCE” for the Amasiri–Okposi–Uburu–Mpu–Ishiagu–Enugu/Port Harcourt Expressway in Enugu and Ebonyi States, a day after the same firm collected ₦426.2m from FERMA for road asphalting, a separate payment already reported by a Nigerian newspaper and not to be confused with this one.

An advance is the first money paid out. It is not the job second certificate, neither is it a balance but the beginning of a contract. Agelink Network Limited appears in the ministry’s records exactly once. The Corporate Affairs Commission records it as an advertising agency and incorporated on 7 September 2001. It has no public record of road construction experience anywhere.

The N9.3 billion advance left the ministry under Permanent Secretary Rafiu Adeladan, the chief accounting officer – the official the Financial Regulations hold personally answerable for every kobo the ministry releases.

What did this company do before it became a road contractor? 

SecretsReporters traced its documented government-contract history. All of it sits in Ebonyi State, inside the years David Umahi governed it.

In 2020, Agelink supplied 3,000 LED streetlight fittings for N85.34 million. In May 2022, it supplied BESDA textbook lots for N25.74 million and N52.08 million. In September 2022, an investigation published at the time reported that Ebonyi State had paid Agelink N20,293,248 for 14,748 exercise books which is N1,376 per book, in a market where the price was then N60 to N80.

The addresses on record shift between Enugu and a street in Abakaliki and billboards, books, fittings are exactly what an advertising agency do until Umahi became a minister when on one day in February 2025, it received the second-largest single transfer in the ministry’s entire payment records under Umahi and the permanent secretary, Engr. Rafiu Olarinre Adeladan, as an advance for an expressway.

Section 35 of the Public Procurement Act 2007 caps mobilisation advances at 15 per cent of contract value. The cap exists to stop the state from bankrolling strangers. The Act’s eligibility and capacity criteria exist for one reason: to ask what an advertising agency is doing with a N9.3 billion road advance. The advance did not land in isolation. In 2024, the ministry’s reportable spending totaled N696.9 billion. N282 billion of it never touched road works at all. Emergency and flood works took N99.6 billion, bridges took N62.3 billion while buildings and infrastructure took N51.7 billion.

The single largest payment in the ministry’s entire dataset is not a road. It is N9,874,418,604.65 to Buildwell Plants and Equipment Industries Limited on 27 May 2024, for the rehabilitation of the Ebute Ero–Outer Marina shoreline in Lagos, an equipment-hire company paid nearly ten billion naira for shoreline works.