Forbes puts billionaire Dangote above $50 billion

Forbes has put Aliko Dangote above $50 billion, adding roughly $20 billion to his fortune in a single revaluation.

What triggered it was not the share sale that opened on Monday. It was the private placement completed in July, in which investors paid $2.5 billion for a slice of the refinery and were 270% oversubscribed. Forbes said the placement pushes Dangote’s net worth over $50 billion, and that there is likely more coming as the refinery begins selling shares to individual investors.

The magazine had him at about $31.5 billion on Sept. 4.

The mechanism is the one that matters. Forbes had been carrying the refinery at a conservative figure because it was private and had no traded price. The placement gave it one, and applying that price to Dangote’s holding produced the jump. No shares changed hands on his side.

Bloomberg has not gone as far. Its Billionaires Index still carries him at $35.3 billion, though its own calculations project $58.2 billion once the offer completes, an increase of about $22.9 billion. That would move him past the American hedge fund manager Ken Griffin and the technology investor Eric Schmidt.

The two trackers have been apart on Dangote for years, and the gap has usually closed in Forbes’ direction once an asset gets a market price.

The offer that prompted all of it opened on Monday, Sept. 14, on the Nigerian Exchange trading floor in Lagos. Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals is selling 4.1 billion ordinary shares at 525 naira each, seeking about 2.15 trillion naira or $1.6 billion, in the largest share sale in African history. It closes on Oct. 13.

The public is being offered a small piece. Forbes noted that the sale covers just 3.3% of the company.

Temi Popoola, chief executive of NGX Group, said the exchange has built connectivity across more than 50 distribution channels including stockbrokers, banks and fintech platforms, and that the capital market must increasingly become a place where Nigerians participate in the value created by the country’s most important businesses.

Not everyone is comfortable with it. Punch has reported that the exchange saw a 1.8 trillion naira drop last Tuesday linked to investors repositioning ahead of the offer, and that the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a cease-and-desist notice in June over unapproved promotional activity around the listing.

The demand left over from July is expected to flow into the public sale.