Tijani Babatunde Folawiyo is the Chairman/Chief Executive Officer of the Yinka Folawiyo Group, a conglomerate with interests in energy, agriculture, shipping and real estate.The oil exploration firm, Yinka Folawiyo Petroleum, owns a 60% participating interest in the Aje Oil and gas field on OML 113 offshore Lagos. This is the first producing field outside of the Niger-Delta in Nigeria. Tunde founded Folawiyo Energy Limited, a subsidiary of the Yinka Folawiyo Group in partnership with Glencore Energy, which has successfully run a World Class petroleum storage facility with a capacity to store 66,000 MT of petroleum products. He is Chairman of YFPower Limited, ENYO Retail & Supply Limited, a fuels retailing and renewable energy products company. ENYO operates eighty-five (85) plus fuel retail stations across eighteen (18) states in Nigeria.
Tunde served as a Non-Executive Director of MTN Nigeria, the premier GSM provider in Nigeria for 18 years from 2001-2019, was a Non-Executive Director of Ecobank Mali for 5 years from 2000 to 2005 and Access Bank Plc where he retired meritoriously after his statutory 12-year term. In April 2019, he became Chairman of Global Citizen Nigeria, an international movement dedicated to eliminating extreme poverty in the world. He is also the Chairman of Coronation Merchant Bank Limited, Temple Management Company, a full-service creative talent and event management firm, T1 Marine Services Limited, a company that offers a wide range of marine support services to the Nigerian offshore oil and gas industry, and Pave Investments Limited, a private investment holding company that invests in private equity and venture capital opportunities with a particular focus on the technology space. He continues serve as Director of La Vallee Energy Services Limited, an indigenous subsea company providing services such as diving, ROV, IRM, subsea construction, installation decommissioning and abandonment. In addition, he serves as Non-Executive Director of Inaugure Hospitality Group based in Abidjan which is on course to become the African continent’s 21st century hotel industry benchmark.
He is the Honorary Consul of Barbados in Nigeria. He is a fellow of the Duke of Edinburgh’s World Fellowship and a member of the Global Advisory Board of the African Leadership Academy, a pan-African institute dedicated to developing and mentoring new generations of African leaders.
Tunde Folawiyo was educated at the London School of Economics, where he obtained a B.Sc. degree in Economics and an LL.B. Additionally; he obtained an LL.M degree from the University College London. He is a Barrister of the Inner Temple of England and Wales and was also admitted to the Nigerian Bar in 1986.