Seyi Tinubu, son of Nigeria’s President-elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has been linked to the purchase of a London mansion which is under fraud investigation by the federal government.

According to Bloomberg, Seyi bought the house in 2017 for $10.8m through his firm, Aranda Overseas Corp.

Citing previously unreported UK company documents, the report said the property was part of the biggest corruption scandal the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari was seeking to probe.

The house was acquired at a time when the Nigerian government was seeking to arrest the house’s former owner, Kolawole Aluko, who was accused of going on the run while owing the country an oil-trading debt worth more than $1.5bn.

There is no suggestion that President-elect Tinubu was personally involved in the acquisition of the UK property in 2017. Tinubu has long been questioned about the source of his family’s wealth, including throughout the recent election campaign when he and his representatives were pressed about it by local and international media.

In an interview with the BBC in the run-up to the election, Tinubu cited Warren Buffett as an example he followed to become rich.

The purchase of the property highlights the difficulties that the Nigerian government has in its fight against corruption. The Nigerian government has initiated legal cases against former Minister of Petroleum, Diezani Alison-Madueke, and two businessmen – Aluko and Olajide Omokore – who won lucrative contracts during her tenure.

The US government said in a 2017 forfeiture lawsuit filed in Texas that the pair bribed the minister by funding her “lavish” lifestyle and failed to pay the state energy company for most of the crude they received. Alison-Madueke, who is based in London, has denied the allegations.

As of at least the end of 2018, the investigation into Aluko was still ongoing, according to court filings. In June 2016, a federal judge in the capital, Abuja, granted a request by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission to seize more than a dozen properties that Aluko had acquired in Nigeria and abroad, including the one in St. John’s Wood. That forfeiture order was still in force when Tinubu’s son bought the house out of receivership 16 months later.

Bloomberg said Tinubu’s spokesman and Seyi did not respond to emails, phone calls, and text messages seeking comment. It also said a British lawyer listed as Aranda’s agent in the UK declined to comment citing confidentiality rules.

In a surprising turn of events, Premium Times, a Lagos-based online newspaper, revealed that during Tinubu’s stay at the 7,000-square-foot London home in August 2021, he received a visit from Buhari. The paper used documents obtained from the Pandora Papers leak of offshore companies’ data to uncover that Adegboyega Oyetola, the former governor of Osun state, and Elusanmi Eludoyin, head of a Nigerian property group, were the shareholders and directors of Aranda from its formation 24 years ago until at least 2010. Despite requests for comment, Oyetola’s spokesman and Eludoyin did not respond.

According to documents filed this year in response to new anti-money laundering rules in the UK and seen by Bloomberg, Aranda, a British Virgin Islands-registered company, has been under the control of Tinubu’s son since June 2011. Tinubu’s son, an entrepreneur active in advertising who played a prominent role in his father’s presidential campaign, registered the company as an overseas entity in the UK on January 20.