Ogun State Secretary To Government Olatokunbo Talabi Bought A £589,000 London House Through Offshore Company With No Mortgage

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The freehold title to the house at 6 Cheldon Avenue, Mill Hill East, London NW7 1GG stands in the name of a British Virgin Islands company. Title number AGL114227 at HM Land Registry records Gardenia Development Ltd as registered proprietor, at the price stated to have been paid on 31 August 2011, £589,000. No mortgage and no loan charge appears anywhere in the register. SecretsReporters pulled the title itself for this investigation. The company’s owner is Olatokunbo Joseph Talabi, Secretary to the Ogun State Government, the most senior political appointee of Governor Dapo Abiodun of the All Progressives Congress. No other outlet has reported that Gardenia Development owns the Cheldon Avenue house, or that the Ogun SSG owns Gardenia Development.

The Register of Overseas Entities entry for Gardenia Development Ltd, number OE017183, registered on 24 January 2023, names Olatokunbo Joseph Talabi, born in June 1962, and Aderinola Oyindamola Talabi, born in March 1967, as the beneficial owners of the company. The register records both of them as owners from 26 January 2011, the very day the company was incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, each holding more than 25 percent of the company and of its voting rights, and each carrying the right to appoint or remove its directors. The correspondence address the register carries for the company is 3 Vori Close, Ikeja, Lagos, the head office of Superflux International Limited, the security printing house Talabi left for government. He was appointed Secretary to the Ogun State Government on 15 June 2019, straight from that chair, on the government’s own appointment statement, and reappointed in June 2023. He has sat in government office for seven years and four months, and Superflux’s own announcement of 16 July 2020 records that Mr. Tokunbo Talabi remains the President of Superflux Group, while Aderinola Talabi sits on the board shown on the company’s own team page.

The Land Registry register walks the house from hand to hand. The title was first registered on 16 January 1998 and carries title absolute. The land passed through Paul Richard Knight and Man Keung Lee on the transfers of 29 January 2003, with provisions as to light, air and boundary structures. On 8 September 2011 the proprietorship register entered Gardenia Development Ltd as proprietor. Its address for service runs to Geneva Place, Waterfront Drive, PO Box 3469, Road Town, Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands, and care of Daniel Ford, 35 Balfe Street, Kings Cross, London N1 9EB. The Charges Register carries no charge in favour of any bank or lender. The only later entry of weight is a restriction entered on 22 September 2022, barring any disposition after 31 January 2023 unless a provision of Schedule 4A of the Land Registration Act applies, the overseas entity restriction. SecretsReporters established each of these entries from the title register itself, purchased from HM Land Registry for this investigation.

Gardenia was incorporated on 26 January 2011, company number 1628936, its registered agent Vistra (BVI) Limited, of Wickhams Cay II, Road Town, Tortola. Its Register of Overseas Entities statement stands overdue, the next statement date having fallen on 23 January 2025, due by 6 February 2025. The Cheldon Avenue house was also the working address of the Talabi companies in Britain. CourierPlus International Limited, company number 10531432, is the only directorship on Talabi’s Companies House officer record. He became its director and sole officer on 19 December 2016, the day it was incorporated, with one pound of capital, no person with significant control recorded, and its registered office and his correspondence address at 6 Cheldon Avenue. CourierPlus never filed a single set of accounts and never filed a single confirmation statement, and it was dissolved by compulsory strike-off on 29 May 2018. His CourierPlus record gives his place of residence as Lagos, Nigeria.

The second company at the house is younger and heavier. Flux Logistix Limited, company number 15858691, was incorporated on 25 July 2024 with its registered office at 6 Cheldon Avenue, a warehousing company. Talabi is not a director of Flux Logistix. He stands over it as a person with significant control, holding more than 50 and less than 75 percent of its shares and voting rights, with the right to appoint or remove directors, and his control record gives his residence as England. Its directors are Gabriel Azu Okonkwo, the managing director of Superflux International, Aderinola Oyindamola Talabi, and Omowonuola Damilola Talabi, born in October 1992. Flux Logistix never filed accounts either, and it was dissolved by compulsory strike-off on 30 December 2025, struck off while its controller sat in the Ogun State Government as its secretary.

The island company died before the London one. Gardenia Development was dissolved in the British Virgin Islands on 2 November 2022, and its undisposed property, the Cheldon Avenue house at the centre of this report, vested in the Crown. On 14 November 2025, three years after the dissolution, Talabi filed a claim in the High Court of the British Virgin Islands, claim number BVIHCOM2025/0487, under section 218 of the BVI Business Companies Act, asking the court to void the dissolution, restore the company and hand back the property the dissolution took from it. The claim is the closing movement of the house story and the companion of the printing question carried in the first part of this SecretsReporters investigation.

The trail runs to America and stops at a suspension. Superflux International (USA) Ltd was filed in California on 6 January 2011, entity number 3347823, a California stock corporation, and the California Secretary of State’s public register names its registered agent as TALABI OLATOKUNBO and gives its status as Suspended, FTB, suspended by the California Franchise Tax Board. A nationwide search of United States property records in the names of Olatokunbo Talabi, Tokunbo Talabi and Aderinola Talabi returns no property standing in any of the names. The documented estate is the one the registers themselves disclose, a London house bought outright by an island company owned from its first day by the man who left the chief executive chair of Nigeria’s security printing house for the secretary’s office of an APC state government, two London companies run from that house and struck off without ever filing accounts, and a court claim in Tortola to bring the island company, and the house, back from the Crown.

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