By Peter Moses, Lagos
The Chairman of First HoldCo Plc, Femi Otedola, yesterday acquired additional shares of the company valued at approximately N43.41 billion amidst a string of insider deals on major publicly quoted companies especially in the banking sector.
The acquisition, executed on the Nigerian Exchange on May 13, 2026, involved the purchase of 549,535,653 shares at an average price of N79 per share.
The transaction was disclosed in a regulatory filing submitted to the Nigerian Exchange Limited (NGX) and signed by the group company secretary, Abiola Baruwa.
With this, Otedola’s stake in First HoldCo Plc has climbed from 8,055,314,486 units reported in the FY 2025 audited accounts to 8,604,850,139 following the latest acquisition.
The acquisition follows a series of stake-building moves by Otedola over the past year.
On September 25, 2025, he increased his interest in First HoldCo with the purchase of 64.87 million shares valued at N2.01 billion.
Of this amount, 39.3 million shares were acquired directly on September 23 for about N1.2 billion, while an additional 25.6 million shares worth N793.6 million were bought indirectly through Calvados Global Services Limited on the same day.
Those earlier transactions raised his shareholding to 16.1 per cent, from the 13.15 per cent stake recorded in September 2024.
With the latest acquisition, the Nigerian billionaire’s total stake has climbed 19.36% in his biggest single purchase since becoming chairman in January 2024.
The purchase comes the same week FirstHoldCo reported a 72% jump in profit before tax for Q1 2026, a N321 billion result that placed it second in Nigeria’s tier-one banking profit league behind only Zenith Bank and validated the N830 billion impairment strategy the group executed in 2025 to clean up its balance sheet.
The stock has gained more than 57% year to date and traded above 563 million shares in volume by mid-session on Tuesday.
Similarly, yesterday, there were several insider deals reported on the Nigerian Exchange.
Among the banking stocks with reported insider dealings during the week were Access Holdings PlC where three officials including Richard Amafonye; Okey Nwuke and Gbenga Babatunde engaged in share deals worth over N200 million for 5m units; 2m units and 1.6m units respectively.
Also in UBA PLC, there was an insider dealing by Workfield Foundation related to the Group Company Secretary with 252, 981 shares purchased on Tuesday as reported by the NGX.
According to the NGX rule, an Insider means a person who has inside information through being a director, employee or shareholder of an issuer of securities traded on The Exchange to which the inside information relates; or who has access to such information by virtue of his employment, office or profession; or such person knows that the direct or indirect source of the inside information was any of the aforementioned persons.