Nigerian tycoon Tein George’s Vaaris to buy Shell gas unit

Shell Plc has agreed to sell its Nigerian gas distribution business to Vaaris Energy Ltd., a privately held group chaired by Nigerian oil services tycoon Tubotein “Tein” George, the second time this year that one of the world’s largest energy companies has picked his consortium as the buyer for its Nigerian assets.

Shell Petroleum B.V. will sell its entire interest in Shell Nigeria Gas, which pipes natural gas to factories and commercial users in three Nigerian states, the London-based company said in a statement on Tuesday. The companies did not disclose the price. The deal needs regulatory approval, and Shell said the business will keep supplying its customers as usual until the sale is completed.

Shell Nigeria Gas was set up in 1998. It runs about 170 kilometers (106 miles) of pipelines in Ogun state, near Lagos, in Abia state in the southeast and in Rivers state in the Niger Delta, and serves more than 130 industrial and commercial customers. The sale covers Shell Nigeria Gas Holding B.V., a Dutch company created in 2019 that holds all but one share of the Nigerian operating company. The unit does not produce gas, run liquefied natural gas plants or trade gas internationally.

“Shell Nigeria Gas has served industrial and commercial customers in Nigeria for more than 25 years, and this agreement provides a much stronger platform for the business’ next chapter under new ownership,” Elohor Aiboni, Shell’s country chair in Nigeria, said in the statement. “Shell continues to focus on strategic Deepwater and Integrated Gas positions in Nigeria.”

The transaction would take Shell out of piped gas distribution in Africa’s most populous country, and it hands George’s group a business with customers, pipelines and decades of operating history less than a year after Vaaris first appeared in public.

Who is Tein George

George, who trained as a banker, built his fortune in the oil services industry rather than in oil production. He chairs Aveon Offshore Ltd., which BusinessDay describes as Nigeria’s largest locally owned oil and gas fabrication yard, and is managing director of Seametric Engineering Ltd. and Sealand Oilfield Services Ltd. He also chairs Pyramid Regal Services Ltd., the company that owns The George, a luxury hotel on Lugard Avenue in Ikoyi, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Lagos.

He studied finance at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and earned an MBA from the University of Lagos in 1984. He began his career at First City Merchant Bank, now FCMB, and then moved to Nigeria International Bank, which later became Citibank Nigeria, where he worked in treasury and corporate banking and handled oil and gas clients until 1991, according to BusinessDay.

He left banking for the oilfield at a time when almost all of the engineering and construction work on Nigerian oil projects went to foreign contractors. Aveon has provided fabrication and construction services in Nigeria since 1999. Its yard in Rumuolumeni, Port Harcourt, covers about 300,000 square meters, has a 200-meter jetty and can load out up to 10,000 tonnes of structures a year, according to the company’s published profiles.

The business grew alongside Nigeria’s local content rules. The Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development Act of 2010 required oil companies to give Nigerian contractors a larger share of their work, and George has said that without the law many projects would have been built overseas. It built subsea structures, manifolds and jumpers for TotalEnergies’ Egina deepwater field as a subcontractor to FMC Technologies, and supplied subsea components for ExxonMobil’s Erha North Phase 2 project through Cameron. For First Exploration & Petroleum Development Co. and state oil company NNPC, it built a 450-tonne production deck and a 350-tonne drilling deck for the Anyala field, a project George valued at tens of millions of dollars.

“As a result of the empowerment arising from the Act, Aveon has been able to employ over 1,000 Nigerians,” George said in 2017, when officials from the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board visited the yard. He later told The Energy Year that the board had been “a game changer for us.”

George has spent the past several years arguing that Nigerian companies should move beyond fabrication into larger roles. In a 2020 interview with The Energy Year, he said Aveon wanted to lead full engineering, procurement and construction contracts and complained that projects in Nigeria take too long to get approved. “It takes too long for projects to be sanctioned, that is the real issue,” he said. He described gas as a likely bridge fuel in the energy transition.

His other interests reach into production and power. He sits on the board of Prime Exploration and Production Ltd., which holds the Asaramatoru marginal field in OML 11, and on the board of West Power and Gas Ltd., an investor in Eko Electricity Distribution Plc, which supplies electricity to large parts of Lagos.

The George and a quiet fortune

The George opened in Ikoyi in mid-2015 with 61 rooms and suites across five floors on more than three acres at 30 Lugard Avenue. It was originally managed by South Africa’s Mantis group, and its target guests are diplomats, senior government officials, executives and wealthy business travelers. The hotel is built around a Renaissance theme, with its restaurant and bar named after Leonardo da Vinci, and it is regularly listed among the most expensive hotels in Lagos. It is run by his wife, Dorcas George, who is its managing director.

George rarely gives interviews about himself and does not appear on public rankings of Nigeria’s wealthiest people. His fortune has not been independently valued. He also chairs two charitable foundations that focus on education and health, according to BusinessDay.

Who else is behind Vaaris

Vaaris has moved quickly. It was incorporated in December 2025, according to BusinessDay, and in January TotalEnergies agreed to sell it a 10% stake in the Renaissance Joint Venture, the onshore oil and gas partnership in the Niger Delta formerly known as the Shell Petroleum Development Co. joint venture.

That deal covers TotalEnergies’ 10% interest in 15 mainly oil-producing licenses, which added about 16,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day to the French company’s output in 2025. TotalEnergies will also transfer its 10% interest in three gas licenses, OML 23, OML 28 and OML 77, which supply about half of the gas used by Nigeria LNG, though it will keep the full economic interest in them. The price was not disclosed, and the sale requires approval from Nigeria’s upstream regulator. TotalEnergies had earlier agreed to sell the same stake to Mauritius-based Chappal Energies for $860 million, but that deal fell apart after regulators rejected it in 2025.

The other partners in the Renaissance venture are NNPC Ltd. with 55%, operator Renaissance Africa Energy Co. with 30% and Eni’s Nigerian unit with 5%.

George sits on the Vaaris board alongside several executives with ties to Seplat Energy Plc, one of Nigeria’s largest independent oil producers. They include Kazeem Raimi, executive director for commercial at Platform Petroleum Ltd., a Seplat board member and a former Seplat general manager, and Johnnie Eni, chief operating officer of AA Holdings Ltd., who oversees the Austin Avuru Foundation and previously led business integrity at Seplat. Avuru, Seplat’s founding chief executive, told Bloomberg in January that he had assembled a group of investors to buy the TotalEnergies assets, BusinessDay reported.

The other directors are Uche Nwangboje, chief financial officer of Pillar Oil Ltd.; Alfred Temile, chief executive of E.A. Temile Ltd. and Temile Development Co., which has interests in energy, maritime logistics and financial services; and Shawley Coker, who founded CISCON Nigeria Ltd. in 1986 and was a founding member of the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board. Vaaris has not published its shareholding structure.

Shell’s long retreat

The sale is the latest step in Shell’s withdrawal from Nigeria’s onshore oil and gas industry, where it has operated since the 1930s. In March 2025, it completed the sale of the Shell Petroleum Development Co. of Nigeria to Renaissance, a consortium of mostly Nigerian companies, in a deal worth up to $2.4 billion. That exit followed years of oil theft, pipeline sabotage and spills in the Niger Delta, along with lawsuits over environmental damage.

Chief Executive Officer Wael Sawan has been trimming Shell’s portfolio worldwide and directing money to projects with higher returns. In Nigeria, the company is keeping its deepwater oil fields, including Bonga, and its stake in Nigeria LNG on Bonny Island.

The gas business gives Vaaris something its upstream deal does not. Nigeria has more than 200 trillion cubic feet of proven gas reserves, the largest in Africa, and the government has spent years trying to persuade factories and power plants to switch from diesel to gas. Shell Nigeria Gas already has the pipes in the ground and paying customers connected to them.

Vaaris has not said how it plans to run the business or whether it intends to extend the network.