Austin Avuru: The Silent Billionaire Making It Big 

Austin Avuru is called the silent billionaire, except that his share price is anything but. Seplat Energy’s shares opened the year at N5,809 and have climbed to N16,000, up 175 per cent, lifting his disclosed stake from about N290.56 billion to N800.31 billion ($586.3 million), a gain of over N509 billion.

That stake is 50,019,178 shares, or 8.34 per cent of Seplat, the company he co-founded and led until July 2020. Silent he may be. Idle, he has never been.

Avuru chaired the technical subcommittee that drafted the 2010 Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development Act, the local-content law. That year, Seplat took a 45 per cent stake in three oil blocks from Shell, Total, and Eni. He helped write the rules, then ran the company using them.

He started as a geologist, graduating from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 1980 and spending 12 years at the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), where he won the GMD Merit Prize in 1983 as best trainee. Allied Energy Resources followed for a decade, then Platform Petroleum in 2002.

In 2009, Platform joined Shebah, the firm of oil executive A.B.C. Orjiako, to bid for blocks the majors were selling. Avuru coined the name Seplat from the first syllables of Sepcol, a Shebah company, and Platform. He became chief executive in May 2010.

Output on the fields rose from roughly 14,000 to 18,000 barrels a day to between 70,000 and 80,000. In 2014, Seplat became the first Nigerian company to list at once on the Nigerian Exchange and the London Stock Exchange.

Seplat completed its purchase of ExxonMobil’s shallow-water business in December 2024 and reported N3.78 trillion in revenue and N1.34 trillion in profit before tax for the nine months to September 2026.

In April 2025, President Bola Tinubu appointed him to the NNPC Limited board, 45 years after he joined the corporation.