Recently, social media was awash with pictures and videos of music super star, Damini Ogulu aka Burna Boy using a crane to lift his Ferrari Testarossa
Recently, social media was awash with pictures and videos of music super star, Damini Ogulu aka Burna Boy using a crane to lift his Ferrari Testarossa valued at N1.6 billion into his penthouse located in the 29-storey tower on Bourdillon road, Ikoyi but only a few people actually know the private businessman who owns the penthouse.
Well, the building belongs to a Dutch businessman, Cornelius G. Vink, a man who has spent the last 45 years avoiding photographs.
The highrise holds between 41 and 44 units, comprising four-bedroom apartments and simplexes, five-bedroom duplex villas, and a six-bedroom triplex penthouse. Amenities include scenic elevators, a private cinema, a gymnasium, a squash court, a tennis court, a spa, a swimming pool, underground parking and 24-hour concierge service. That is not the only highrise owned by his group, he is also the brain behind a 25-floor twin tower at the corner of Bourdillon and Thompson Road that was completed in early 2020 and stands 102.6 metres tall, among the tallest residential buildings in West Africa. It holds 41 apartments across three and four-bedroom flats, five-bedroom duplexes and duplex penthouses, with roof gardens, curved balconies and glazed balustrades.
Cornelius owns Tropical General Investments, a conglomerate based in Nigeria with a subsidiary that deals with properties, Kaizen Properties.
Vink arrived in Lagos from the Netherlands in the 1970s, incorporated TGI in 1980, and began importing Caprison juice in 1982, founding CHI Limited the same year, which grew into one of the largest beverage companies in Nigeria behind Chivita and Hollandia. Coca-Cola would later acquire CHI in 2019 for a figure widely reported at $1 billion.
Cornelius is also the brain behind Titan Trust Bank which it acquired via his TGI Group from Union Bank of Nigeria.
The group owns more than a hundred brands across fast-moving consumer goods, agricultural inputs, industrial chemicals, home care products and pharmaceuticals, and about 24 companies sit under Vinc Corporation, the entity above TGI. From WACOT Rice Mill in Kebbi State described as the largest parboiled rice mill in Africa to CORMART, one of the largest manufacturers of styrene-acrylic in Nigeria, a raw material for the paint industry to CHI Pharmaceuticals a pharmaceutical company in West Africa to Fludor Benin, the largest cashew processing plant in the Republic of Benin.
Cornelius holds the title Member of the Order of the Federal Republic, conferred on him by the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. He has been running companies in Nigeria since the 1980s and is described in Nigerian business circles as a silent operator, someone who makes large moves without announcing them. He gives no interviews. He does not appear at industry events in any regular way. Forbes has never listed him, and no credible estimate of his fortune exists in public.
