Why it is on record
Record held
Founders
Headquarters
Key dates
- 2000Zenon Petroleum & Gas Ltd founded by Femi Otedola.
- 2005–2008Becomes the largest private importer of automotive gas oil (diesel) in Nigeria, controlling a major share of downstream diesel supply to industry and the gen-set economy.
- 2007Zenon acquires majority stake in African Petroleum Plc (the former British Petroleum / BP Nigeria); rebranded Forte Oil in 2010.
- 2013Through Amperion, the Otedola group acquires Geregu Power in the PHCN privatisation.
- 2019Otedola exits Forte Oil; Zenon retains residual storage and trading assets.
Deep dive
Zenon Petroleum & Gas is the founding vehicle of the Femi Otedola industrial story. Incorporated in 2000 — at the beginning of the Fourth Republic downstream liberalisation — Zenon scaled from a trading desk to the largest single private importer of diesel in Nigeria within five years, on the back of the deregulation of the AGO (automotive gas oil) market and the runaway demand from the off-grid generator economy.
The 2007 acquisition of African Petroleum Plc — the former BP Nigeria, indigenised as AP in the 1970s — was the largest private downstream-sector takeover in Nigerian history at that point and transformed Zenon's parent from a trading house into a retail major. AP was rebranded Forte Oil in 2010 and listed; Otedola's 2019 exit closed that chapter but Zenon itself retained storage and supply contracts and remains a privately held trading and logistics operation.
Zenon's significance is biographical as much as commercial: it is the company that funded the acquisitions that made Femi Otedola one of the principal industrial figures of the Fourth Republic, and the institutional bridge from the downstream oil economy to his current power-sector dominance via Geregu Power.