In Bed with Tinubu: The Lebanese Billionaire Network Advising Trump’s Nigeria Policy
The president’s Africa envoy has a documented business relationship with Nigeria’s president’s primary no-bid contractor — a convicted money launderer. Both are Lebanese men who have operated in the same Lagos commercial world for thirty years. Trump is getting Africa policy advice from a man whose business clients need Tinubu in power — and whose financial relationships in Lagos give him every reason to make sure Washington looks the other way.
An EarthShaker Exclusive Investigation
By Mike Arnold
Massad Boulos is Donald Trump’s Senior Advisor for Africa. He is also Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law. He spent thirty years in Lagos as CEO of a heavy machinery company. He holds a Nigerian passport. He knows Nigeria’s commercial elite the way a man knows his own backyard.
He also has a documented business relationship with Gilbert Chagoury — a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire convicted of money laundering, flagged by the FBI for suspected Hezbollah financing, and now the recipient of more than $13 billion in no-bid government contracts from Nigeria’s president Bola Tinubu.
Boulos’s company supplies equipment to Chagoury’s construction arm. Chagoury’s construction arm gets billions from Tinubu. This is not allegation. It is in Boulos’s own corporate defense statement — published by his own people, in his own defense, after his Trump appointment.
The man advising Trump that there is no Christian genocide in Nigeria has been doing business with the man getting rich off a government that has paid more than $10 million to Washington lobbyists — including Trump’s own Day-One State Department advisor — to deny the genocide, rehabilitate Tinubu’s image on Capitol Hill, and neutralize every congressional move to hold Nigeria accountable. His business clients need Tinubu in power. Draw your own conclusion.
On October 14, 2025, the Nigerian government flew me to Abuja. They expected a useful American voice — Jane Fonda in Vietnam, Nigeria edition. I’d made sixteen trips to Nigeria. I knew exactly what they were doing. Trusted high-level advisors told me there was a good chance I wouldn’t make it out alive if I did what I planned to do — so I updated my will before I boarded the plane.
They thrust me into a small hotel room with a camera crew and three northern imams — including Isa Pantami, a former Nigerian government minister on record declaring “We are all happy whenever unbelievers are being killed.” They recited the pre-approved talking points with smiles and posed for a photo op. I flipped the bird at the camera without them noticing — to spike the photos.
That was the warm-up act. Then came the press conference. Seated at a table in front of the international media, where I was expected to deliver genocide denial, I delivered an indictment instead. Calculated genocide. Declared on the record. In Nigeria’s capital. The Nigerian Senate convened a session that same day. Within 72 hours the story had racked up 3.2 billion global impressions — flipping the worldwide narrative from 80 percent denial to 70 percent affirmation of genocide.
Within those same 72 hours, in a meeting not previously announced, Boulos sat down privately with Tinubu in Rome. They knew exactly what had just happened. Boulos walked straight out and onto Nigerian state television.
His exact words, broadcast on NTA, October 17, 2025: “Those who know the terrain well know that terrorism has no colour, no religion and no tribe. We even know that Boko Haram and ISIS are killing more Muslims than Christians.”
I know those talking points. I’d heard them recited by smiling radical imams in a Lagos hotel room. They were engineered by a Sharia propagandist on George Soros’s payroll, laundered through a Soros-funded think tank, adopted by the UN, embedded in academic literature, and repeated by Western media until they became the official story. I refused to deliver them. Boulos delivered them instead — stated as established fact, with even more certainty than the people who invented them.
This is not a man who arrived at those conclusions independently. This is a man with thirty years of Lagos relationships, a business partnership with Tinubu’s primary contractor, and a financial stake in the Nigerian status quo — telling Trump’s White House that there is nothing to see here.
WHO THEY ARE
Massad Boulos is 54. Born in Lebanon. Holds four citizenships: Lebanese, Nigerian, French, and American. Moved to Lagos in 1996, installed as CEO of SCOA Nigeria PLC — a heavy truck and machinery company — by his father-in-law, Lebanese business tycoon Michel Zouhair Fadoul. Held that post for nearly thirty years. His son Michael married Tiffany Trump in 2022. Trump appointed him Senior Advisor on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs in December 2024, then added Africa to his portfolio in April 2025 — making him the most senior US official handling the African continent.
Gilbert Chagoury is 81. Born in Lagos to Lebanese immigrant parents. Co-founded the Chagoury Group in 1971 — a conglomerate spanning construction, real estate, hotels, flour milling, and international finance. Banana Island is largely his. Eko Atlantic City — 10 million square meters of land reclaimed from the Atlantic Ocean — is his. The Eko Hotel is his. He is, by any measure, one of the most powerful private figures in the history of modern Nigeria.
Both men are Lebanese. Both hold Nigerian citizenship. Both speak local Nigerian dialects. Both have operated for decades in the same small, tight world of Lagos commercial and political power — the exact world where Bola Tinubu built his political machine, bought his loyalties, and consolidated his grip on Nigeria’s presidency. They are not strangers who happened to share a continent. They are documented business partners embedded in the same network that put Tinubu in Aso Rock.
THE RECORD ON CHAGOURY
Gilbert Chagoury is not an obscure figure. His record is extensive, public, and damning.
In 2000, a Swiss court convicted him of money laundering and aiding a criminal organization. He had funneled more than $120 million from Nigeria’s Central Bank through Geneva accounts on behalf of Sani Abacha — the military dictator who looted an estimated $2 to $5 billion from the Nigerian people. Chagoury paid $600,000 in fines and returned $66 million to the Nigerian government.
In 2010, FBI agents pulled Chagoury off a private jet at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. He had been placed on the US terrorism no-fly list. A 2013 FBI intelligence report cited suspicions he had sent funds to a Lebanese politician who transferred money to Hezbollah. He eventually obtained a written apology from the US government and a travel waiver.
In 2018, Chagoury and associates paid $1.8 million to the US Department of Justice to resolve a federal investigation into illegal campaign contributions to American politicians — including contributions connected to the conviction of Nebraska Congressman Jeff Fortenberry.
Convicted money launderer. FBI terrorism watch list. DOJ campaign finance settlement. This is the man receiving Nigeria’s largest infrastructure contracts. This is the man whose construction arm Boulos’s company supplies.
WHAT CHAGOURY GETS FROM TINUBU
The Chagoury-Tinubu relationship goes back to at least 1999, when Tinubu became governor of Lagos. In 2007, as his governorship ended, Tinubu’s administration handed the Chagoury Group title to 10 million square meters of Lagos coastline. No competitive process. That land became Eko Atlantic City.
Under Tinubu’s presidency since 2023, Chagoury has accumulated:
The Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway: $11 to $13 billion, awarded to Hitech Construction — a Chagoury subsidiary — without competitive bidding. Tinubu’s son Seyi sits on the board of a separate Chagoury Group subsidiary. ICIJ-leaked documents show Seyi Tinubu and Ronald Chagoury Jr. were majority shareholders together in a British Virgin Islands offshore company.
Tin Can and Apapa port rehabilitation: Approximately $700 million, awarded to ITB Construction Nigeria — another Chagoury subsidiary.
Snake Island port terminal: A 45-year, $1 billion concession, with Chagoury’s ITB as construction contractor.
Nigeria’s second-highest national honor: On January 8, 2026 — Chagoury’s 80th birthday — Tinubu secretly conferred the Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger on him. No public ceremony. No official citation. The award only became public when a billionaire friend posted the certificate on social media.
Tinubu’s own words about Chagoury: “With friends like him, one can sleep with a still mind.”
Boulos’s company supplies the equipment that builds it all. That is the chain. It is documented.
THIS NETWORK OWNS BOTH PARTIES
Chagoury did not build his Washington access through one party. He cultivated both — methodically, over decades.
He donated $1 to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation and pledged $1 billion to the Clinton Global Initiative. In 2009, a Clinton Foundation associate pushed State Department aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills to connect Chagoury with the US ambassador to Lebanon. State Department emails confirm it.
The State Department under Hillary Clinton refused to designate Boko Haram a foreign terrorist organization despite evidence presented from 2010 onward. The designation finally came in 2013 — three years late. During those three years, Boko Haram grew from a regional threat into a mass killing machine. Senator David Vitter publicly pressed the State Department to explain whether Chagoury’s Clinton Foundation donations influenced that decision. No satisfactory answer was ever produced.
Now the Republican side. Boulos — whose company supplies equipment to Chagoury’s construction arm — is Trump’s Africa envoy. Reuters has reported his Lebanese political network includes figures with ties to Hezbollah-aligned parties. His father-in-law financially supported the Free Patriotic Movement, a Hezbollah Christian coalition partner in Lebanon.
Chagoury flagged by the FBI over suspected Hezbollah financing. Boulos with documented Lebanese political connections to Hezbollah-aligned parties. Both embedded in Lagos for decades. One bought access to the Clintons. One married into the Trump family.
The network spans administrations. It is not partisan. It is transactional. And it has been shaping American policy on Nigeria for thirty years.
WHERE IS THE DISCLOSURE?
Federal law requires it. The Ethics in Government Act mandates that senior White House advisors file a public financial disclosure — OGE Form 278e — within thirty days of entering a covered position. The form requires full disclosure of assets, income sources, and business relationships. It exists specifically to identify conflicts of interest before they corrupt policy.
Boulos was required to file one. Whether he did — and whether it disclosed his business relationship with the Chagoury Group — is a question the public cannot currently answer. Shortly after Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, the White House took its financial disclosures page offline.
The Chagoury Group is a major client of Boulos’s company. Hitech Construction depends significantly on SCOA for machinery. Those are Boulos’s own people’s words. That relationship should have appeared on his disclosure. Whether it did, whether anyone reviewed it, whether any ethics agreement was required — none of that is publicly available.
The law required Boulos to disclose his financial relationships before advising the president. The White House took its disclosure page offline. The public cannot see what he filed — or whether the Chagoury connection was ever disclosed to anyone. That is not a technicality. That is the ballgame.
WHAT MUST HAPPEN
Boulos’s OGE Form 278e must be made public immediately. Did it disclose the Chagoury Group as a client? Did it disclose that Hitech Construction — recipient of a $13 billion no-bid contract from Tinubu — depends on Boulos’s company for equipment? Did any ethics official review and clear it? Congress should demand the filing now.
Congress must examine whether Chagoury’s Clinton Foundation donations influenced the Boko Haram terrorist designation delay from 2010 to 2013. Those three years cost thousands of Nigerian lives. A sitting senator asked the question. It was never answered.
The Tinubu files must be produced. June 1, 2026 is the court-ordered deadline for the FBI and DEA to release records on Nigeria’s president’s heroin trafficking investigation. What those files reveal about the asset relationships surrounding Nigerian political power will determine whether any US policy advice on Nigeria can be trusted.
Trump’s instincts on Nigeria were right. The CPC designation. The Sokoto strike. The congressional delegation. Those were the right moves.
But none of it matters if the man whispering in his ear is in business with the man those moves are supposed to hold accountable.
The clock is running. If Trump looks away — or leaves office without dramatic intervention — Nigeria falls. The people advising him to look away have a financial stake in what comes next. He needs to know that. And now he does.
Rise.
#EarthShaker
Mike Arnold is the author of EPICENTER: Nigeria, Radical Islam, and the War for Global Order(#1 Amazon Bestseller), executive producer and director of the documentary Me & Ms. Hanatu, and founder of Africa Arise International. He has made sixteen documented trips to Nigeria.
Note: the image used in this post is an ai-generated satire.