Secrets Reporters
Fifth Schedule of the Nigerian 1999 Constitution, Paragraphs 1 and 2(b) Prohibits a public officer from holding personal interests that conflict with official duty, and bars full-time public officers from private business involvement. A sustained, financed family property arrangement doubling as the routing address for a personal U.S. real estate acquisition raises direct questions under both provisions.
Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act (Cap. C15, LFN 2004) requires full, periodic declaration of all assets, liabilities and property interests, in Nigeria and abroad, held by a public officer or immediate family.
These laws may have been broken by a top Nigerian National Petroleum Commission Limited (NNPCL) brass.
Evelyn Aimua Orumwense sits inside one of the most sensitive legal seats in Nigeria’s oil sector a senior legal adviser/company secretary in EnServ, one of the arms of the national oil company. It is a full-time public office, bound by the same constitutional obligations of disclosure and undivided loyalty that apply to every officer paid from Nigeria’s treasury.
SecretsReporters has traced a documented trail of American property connections running through her name and her family, a trail that raises the same question this newspaper has now put to more than one NNPCL official: what has been declared to the Code of Conduct Bureau, and what hasn’t?
Property records examined by SecretsReporters show long standing ownership of a residential property at 1860 Plymouth Drive, Woodlyn, Pennsylvania, under the names Jude Arijaje and Edith E. Orumwense, names that recur across successive deeds alongside multiple related name variants.
The property is a two-storey structure, in some records classified as a multi-unit building of two to four units, built in 1963 with a brick-and-stone exterior over a wood frame. It holds three bedrooms and one bathroom across roughly 1,120 square feet, on a lot of about nine-hundredths of an acre, and carries a current estimated market value of $253,250. It is recorded as owner-occupied.
The ownership trail runs deep with Jude Arijaje first acquiring the property in 2006 for $166,000. Quit-claim transfers and deeds of trust followed in 2013, 2016 and again in 2021, with the market value now at $253,250.
Nigeria’s Constitution does not leave room for ambiguity on what this arrangement demands of a sitting public officer. A senior legal officer inside a federally owned oil company in a named transaction as recently as 2021 sits squarely inside the disclosure and conflict of interest questions this constitutional framework exists to answer. SecretsReporters has found no evidence that this web of property ties has been fully declared.
The Money Laundering (Prevention and Prohibition) Act 2022 frames it that where financed U.S. property is refinanced repeatedly over nearly two decades and tied to the acquisition of further American real estate by a serving Nigerian public officer, the source and movement of funds behind both transactions warrant scrutiny to rule out layering of undisclosed income, while the Foreign Exchange (Monitoring and Miscellaneous Provisions) Act governs the legality of outward transfers of Nigerian-sourced funds used to service U.S. mortgages or fund property acquisitions, a question directly relevant given the scale and duration of financing tied to this property trail.
When contacted to know if she declared the property in her CCB assets declaration form, she didn’t respond to our message.
