According to the complaint, Mmobuosi later admitted to never owning any aircraft. The images used to show “Tingo Airlines” showed airplanes with the Tingo logo “photoshopped onto pictures of airplanes it did not own.”
The company also publicized sham expansion projects, Cheng said, such as leading investors to believe it was breaking ground on a $1.6 billion food processing plant and that it was making “significant progress” on the facility’s construction “even though the purported progress in reality consisted of six cinderblocks and a plaque.”
Additionally, Cheng said Tingo did not have relationships with two farming cooperatives it claimed to have and that the company lacked effective controls over accounting and financial reporting.
The truth about Tingo started coming to light in June 2023, the complaint states, when investment research firm Hindenburg Research published a report titled “Tingo Group: Fake Farmers, Phones, and Financials — The Nigerian Empire That Isn’t.” The report revealed, among other things, the company was an “exceptionally obvious scam with fabricated financials” and had made continuous, false representations about its business, operations, and prospects.
