By Princewill Ameh
The story starts like most dangerous ones do: with a name people try not to say too loudly in public, and a return nobody claims to have witnessed directly.
One year after Bashir Haske — the billionaire long declared wanted by the EFCC and long whispered about as an ally of the NNPC GCEO — supposedly vanished beyond reach, he has surfaced in Nigeria again. Not through the front door. Not with the kind of visibility that invites questions. He returned the way money returns when it still has work to do: surreptitiously, clandestinely, and with the confidence of someone who knows exactly which hands move fastest.
Unconfirmed rumors sweep through Abuja and the oil belt at the same speed they always do: fast, contradictory, and somehow always close to the truth. The chatter this time centers on timing — specifically, the closing stages of NNPC’s Project Delta.
Project Delta, as described in industry circles, is an initiative designed to dispose of NNPC’s interests in various oil blocks to raise funds for the Federal Government. If it is true that Haske’s return is aligned with those final stages, then the narrative is not merely about his personal comeback. It is about leverage — about being present when assets are most vulnerable to pricing pressure, urgency, and political bargaining.
Haske has never been the kind of man who waits his turn.
The asset everyone keeps circling: Antan Producing Ltd
The asset now at the center of the conversation is Antan Producing — formerly Addax Petroleum — an entity that insiders say has always been coveted by Haske. In the oil and gas world, “coveted” doesn’t just mean interested. It means watched. It means analyzed before everyone else notices it is on the market. It means prepared for.
And then there’s the detail that turns rumor into something closer to a blueprint.
Ironically — or perhaps inevitably — Bayo Ojulari was Haske’s technical consultant in appraising the value of the current Antan assets in 2022 when Haske bid unsuccessfully for those assets against Emeka Offor and ABC Orjiakor. The relationship between Ojulari and Haske doesn’t prove anything by itself. But in a business where diligence is often performative, and discretion is often strategic, a familiar face in the appraisal history is the kind of breadcrumb people follow.
Industry watchers now believe Haske and Ojulari have already aligned the necessary components required to seal the Antan deal — moving early enough to control the story, moving quietly enough to avoid the spotlight.
OML 137: where the numbers start to sound like motives
The appeal of the Antan angle, according to the same watchers, is anchored in the gas endowment tied to the OML 137 block.
The claimed figures are hard to ignore:
- Oil production capacity: 40,000 barrels per day
- Gas reserves: 3 trillion cubic feet of gas.
Then comes the math that turns boardroom talk into something sharper —something you can almost hear as people whisper “how much” into their phones.
If industry conversion logic is applied so that 3 trillion cubic feet equates to roughly 3,000,000,000 MMBtu, the fully developed monetized valuation using the European Union Gas (Dutch TTF Benchmark) of $19.50 per MMBtu would return in excess of $61 billion to the owners of the asset.
And in the “worst case” scenario — using Nigeria’s Commercial Wholesale Market Price of $2.68 per MMBtu the asset would generate over $8 billion in monetary proceeds.
Those are not numbers you fight over with speeches. Those are numbers you fight over with timing, paperwork, intermediaries, and the kind of coordination that looks like coincidence only when you’re not the one staring at the calendar.
The partners in crime prepare their seats
So the movie begins, even before the credits roll.
In the thriller version, everyone believes Haske’s return is about reclaiming value —about converting technical appraisal into commercial execution, about placing the right people at the right doors in the final days of Project Delta. In that version, the tension is procedural: approvals, valuations, bidding windows, regulatory cover, and the careful choreography of “compliance” that somehow always favours the same destination.
In the horror version, the same procedures become something else entirely: a system of arrangements designed to launder outcomes. Not just to transfer interests, but to make the transfer look inevitable — until the nation wakes up to discover that what it sold was not only assets, but leverage, options, and future revenue streams.
Either way, the partners in crime — real or imagined — appear to have hit the same conclusion: if Antan can be bought cleanly, it will be bought loudly; if it can’t, it will be bought quietly.
Haske and Ojulari have the kind of history that suggests they understand how deals are actually won.
What comes next
If the rumours hold, the Antan deal will not be treated as a single transaction. It will be treated as a storyline — one engineered around appraisal history, technical valuation familiarity, and a window of institutional churn when attention is stretched thin and decision timelines compress.
And as Project Delta reaches its closing stages, the lingering question is not whether Haske returned.
The question is what, exactly, he returned to secure.
Whether the next phase of this saga plays like a thriller — full of sharp reversals and last-minute disclosures — or like a horror movie in corporate clothing, the opening scene is already in place: a fugitive billionaire back in motion, an asset back within reach, and a nation’s oil future being bargained over in the half-light.
What’s sad is that when caught, they will resort to the refuge of the scoundrels they are and say: “we were doing it for Baba.”
Ameh, a public affairs commentator, writes from Abuja.