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My Boat Is Bigger Than Yours: Dangote's boat is on the right, beside Femi Otedola's. Photo Credit: Linda Ikeji
At the moment, very little is known about the yacht – who built it, how much it cost or even just how big it is. However, judging by pictures available on several Nigerian websites, the yacht looks significantly smaller than those owned by Dangote’s billionaire peers Roman Abramovich, Paul Allen or Andrey Melnichenko, making the Nigerian billionaire’s latest acquisition seem almost like a baby’s toy.
What we know for sure is that the yacht, which has been christened Mariya, was built specially for him. It recently arrived in Lagos and it’s currently sitting on the water at Carrington Crescent, Victoria Island, Lagos just next to the yacht that belongs to Dangote’s close friend and former Forbes billionaire Femi Otedola.
Here’s an interesting dynamic: Dangote’s boat looks like a bigger, exact replica of Femi Otedola’s boat, as you’ll see in the picture above. Dangote and Otedola have become closer friends following a bitter 2009 conflict between the two in which Otedola, a prominent diesel marketer and chairman of Zenon Petroleum, claimed that Dangote broke a gentleman’s agreement by thwarting Zenon’s bid to buy Chevron’s local subsidiary. The two erstwhile friends were at each other’s throats for a while, but they made up shortly afterwards and have reportedly become closer than ever before. They’ve become so close, it appears, that they even own nearly identical yachts.
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