How Benoy Berry built a fortune on Nigeria’s $2,000 card

Indian-born tycoon Benoy Berry’s Contec Global has produced Nigeria’s residence card for foreign workers since 1999, a contract that has given it the biggest share of the $2,000 annual fee most expatriate workers pay to live in the country.

The Combined Expatriate Residence Permit and Aliens Card, known as CERPAC, is made by Continental Transfert Technique Ltd., the Nigerian arm of Berry’s group, under an agreement with the Ministry of Interior. That contract has made Berry one of the most consequential and least visible businessmen in Nigeria’s public sector. It has also pulled him into a two-decade fight with the government that pays him, including an arbitration award of about $252 million that Nigeria fought for years and a court ruling that called his deal unconstitutional.

Berry, an Indian-born entrepreneur who holds Irish and Nigerian citizenship, has done business in Nigeria for more than four decades. He and his sons have built the permit business into a group that now takes in biometric identity systems across Africa, an organic farming company, a mobile money platform, a Lagos phone assembly plant and Wiesmann, the German sports car maker his sons rescued from closure.

From Delhi to Lagos

Berry studied economics at the University of Delhi, graduating with first-class honors, and took a master’s degree in finance at the Delhi School of Economics. He later added honorary and doctoral titles in communication arts and business administration, and he is usually addressed as Dr. Benoy Berry.

His companies have served the Nigerian government since 1978, according to findings of the Federal Court of Australia, which examined his business history in detail in 2017. He founded Contec in 1984. His son Roheen, who now runs much of the group, described it in a 2017 interview as a business his father started in Nigeria 39 years earlier and as a “40-year-old company of five generations in Africa.”

Contec stayed out of the newspapers for most of that time. “We have been very silent as Contec Global over the last 40 years,” Roheen Berry said.

The company’s specialty is secure technology for governments: identity documents, biometric capture, card production and the databases behind them. Such contracts are slow to win, hard to replace once installed and paid for over many years.

The breakthrough came on May 25, 1999, when Continental Transfert Technique signed an agreement with what was then the Ministry of Internal Affairs to develop and run the CERPAC scheme. The arrangement was a public-private partnership. Contec supplied the technology, card production and centers, and the Nigeria Immigration Service issued the permits. Contec was paid from the fees.

The scheme grew with Nigeria’s expatriate workforce, which is concentrated in oil, gas, construction and manufacturing. Before the government decentralized CERPAC, eight centers issued the cards. The network has since grown to 35 centers, leaving only Borno and Yobe, both hit by insurgency, without one. In 2022 it opened a production center at the immigration command in Port Harcourt, at an event attended by Shell, Total, Agip, Nigeria LNG and Julius Berger.

The credit rating agency Agusto & Co. has described Continental Transfert Technique as the “sole provider” of CERPAC to the immigration service. Agusto rated the company Bbb- with a stable outlook, pointing to good profitability, strong cash generation and a niche market protected by a long government contract. It also flagged rising intercompany receivables, including interest-free loans to directors, high finance costs and concentrated ownership.

Fighting the government that pays him

Berry’s first major fight with the Nigerian state started over a surcharge. Contec said the government owed it money for a gate-reader system it had installed, and on Nov. 20, 2007, it began arbitration in London against the federal government, the attorney general and the minister of interior.

The tribunal ruled on Aug. 14, 2008, and found Nigeria liable for about $252 million, or ₦29.6 billion at the time, plus most of the costs of the arbitration. Nigeria did not pay.

Contec went after the award on three continents. The English High Court recognized it and entered judgment, and said it would hold enforcement only if Nigeria posted a £100 million bond. Nigeria did not post it. Nigeria’s government asked its own Federal High Court to set the award aside, but the court refused, held the award enforceable in Nigeria and let Contec pursue it abroad.

In Washington, Judge Paul Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted Contec summary judgment in 2011. An amended judgment in 2013 put the debt at $276.1 million plus interest, and an appeals court upheld it in January 2015. Contec then tried to collect. In 2018 it asked the court to attach an account at JPMorgan Chase in the name of the Central Bank of Nigeria. The central bank intervened, argued the account was immune, and in August 2019 Friedman denied the attachment.

Nigerian officials still remember the episode. In 2020 Muhammed Babandede, then the comptroller general of immigration, told senators that Contec “wanted to seize our property, including our mission and NNPC building.” The government has never said whether it paid or settled the award.

The two sides kept doing business throughout. The CERPAC contract was renewed under Abdulrahman Dambazau, who served as interior minister from 2015 to 2019, and Contec kept producing the cards.

The contract came under its heaviest scrutiny after Dec. 13, 2018. On that date, at Contec’s request, the interior ministry doubled the CERPAC fee to $2,000 from $1,000 and froze it at that level for three years. Dambazau later said the increase was part of a push to curb fraud by companies holding expatriate quotas.

The revenue split later became public. Under the $1,000 fee, Contec kept 72%. Under the new fee, it took 55%, the federal government 33%, the immigration service 7% and the interior ministry 5%.

Femi Falana, the human rights lawyer, sued the minister, the immigration chief and Continental Transfert Technique in 2019. In November that year, Justice Rilwan Aikawa of the Federal High Court in Lagos declared the company’s role in fixing and collecting the fee “illegal and unconstitutional” and ordered all CERPAC fees collected since 2014 to be refunded into the Federation Account. The government appealed, and in March 2020 the court stayed its own judgment.

That same year the dispute moved to the National Assembly. Babandede told a Senate committee that Contec collected about ₦15 billion of the ₦20 billion the scheme raised in 2018 and ₦23 billion of the ₦40 billion it raised in 2019. He said the immigration service could produce the card itself for about $500 and send the remaining $1,500 to the treasury. “It is not rocket science,” he said. In August 2020 he petitioned the attorney general to review the contract, citing revenue losses, data protection and conflicts with the Immigration Act.

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission had already looked at the company. In 2019 it examined ₦72.07 billion that Contec realized from residence permits and accused the firm of underpaying withholding tax and value-added tax.

Contec has defended the scheme as a security tool. Berry has argued that the CERPAC centers cut down on fake permits and on touts who preyed on genuine expatriates, and that the company’s card scanners and biometric equipment at international airports help catch illegal entry. “Smart technology remains the best means of identifying and stamping out perpetrators of terrorism,” he said. The company told reporters in 2017 that it had remitted ₦1.2 billion to the government over the previous year.

A win against a banknote printer

Berry’s second long legal battle was with the Australian banknote printer Securency, then half-owned by the Reserve Bank of Australia, and it ended in his favor.

In February 2006, Securency appointed Berry and his London company, Global Secure Currency Ltd., as its agent in Nigeria for polymer banknote material, with a 15% commission on sales to Nigerian authorities. Berry had already won a Central Bank of Nigeria order in April 2005 for 50 million ₦1,000 polymer notes worth €4.88 million. The Nigerian Security Printing and Minting Co. went on to order polymer for the ₦20 note, which launched in February 2007, with further orders in 2008.

In February 2008, at his London home, a Securency executive persuaded Berry to sign a letter ending the agency, telling him he would keep his commission under a new arrangement. Securency wanted him out because the London arbitration had made him unpopular with the Nigerian government, and it feared losing sales. Berry learned the truth from news reports in 2009, when Securency’s bribery of foreign officials became public. Peter Chapman, the executive who brought Berry the termination letter, was convicted in London in 2016 of bribing the managing director of Nigeria’s mint. The Australian courts made no finding that Berry took part in the bribery.

A Federal Court judge called Securency’s conduct a “shabby fraud” and in 2018 awarded Berry and Global Secure Currency A$64.8 million. The Full Court cut the award to about A$1.8 million on appeal. In August 2020, the High Court of Australia unanimously raised it again, ruling that a company which deceives its counterparty bears the burden of proving it would have behaved lawfully anyway. Berry was awarded more than A$27 million in lost commissions.

The trial judge found Berry broadly credible, though Berry admitted lying about whether he had traveled to Nigeria between 2006 and 2010.

Berry also sued in Abuja. In 2014 Global Secure Currency won leave to serve a writ on the Reserve Bank of Australia, Securency and Innovia Films, seeking up to €4 billion over the collapse of a plan to build a polymer currency plant in Nigeria.

Burundi, phones, fintech and sports cars

Contec used the Nigerian contract as a template elsewhere. In January 2007 it signed a $200 million agreement with Burundi to build an e-government platform for passports, visas, residence permits, driver’s licenses, vehicle registration and national identity cards. At that point the company said it was already working in Niger, Burkina Faso, Sudan, Uganda, Benin, Rwanda and Gambia. Berry also serves as Burundi’s honorary consul in India.

The group has since moved well beyond government work. Contec Global Agro produces bio-fertilisers, bio-seeds and bio-pesticides and runs cassava, banana, tomato and potato farms. Roheen Berry said in 2017 that its organic farming program had empowered 10,000 young entrepreneurs. A gas unit, Cogo, set out to use flared gas for small-scale power and industrial transport.

In April 2017 another son, Sahir Berry, opened AfriOne, a smartphone and tablet assembly plant in Lagos with about 500 staff and capacity for 300,000 devices a month. It was billed as the first Nigerian-made smartphone line. Sahir also co-founded NowNow, a digital payments and mobile wallet company, with Mahesh Nair. NowNow raised $13 million in seed funding in September 2022 in a round led by NeoVision Ventures and said it had more than 50,000 agents across Nigeria.

The most unexpected purchase was in Germany. Wiesmann, the Dülmen-based maker of hand-built sports cars powered by BMW engines, filed for insolvency in August 2013 and closed in 2014. Contec Global later bought it under the direction of Roheen and Sahir Berry, and Roheen became chief executive. In April 2022 the company revealed Project Thunderball, an all-electric roadster with 671 horsepower and a price of about €300,000. Wiesmann said its first year of production sold out.

The CERPAC system has moved online. In May 2025 the interior ministry and the immigration service launched the Expatriate Administration System, which handles quota, business permit and CERPAC applications digitally and issues the e-CERPAC before a worker enters Nigeria. The fee is still $2,000. The government has not said publicly how the new platform affects Continental Transfert Technique’s share of that revenue.

Berry runs the group from London with his sons. In Nigeria, his name rarely appears outside court records and award ceremonies, from a Black Achievers award in Britain in 2011 to honors from Nigerian journalists’ groups. The Contec Global Foundation, which he founded, works in Nigeria and Burundi, and he chairs Jago Bharat, a charity in India.