Deji Olatoye is a Nigerian corporate lawyer and corporate governance/sustainability professional whose wide-ranging experiences cut across law office, in-house and business advisory/management consulting environments. Deji has led legal advisory services on various novel and complex transactions, including in Corporate Restructuring, Cross-Border M&A, Electronic Payment, Public Sector Reform/PPP, Corporate Venturing, ICT, Media, Sport & Entertainment. He is therefore steeped in the transactional and institutional aspects of corporate advisory works, having advised on the inbound and outbound sides of investment in the three important legal jurisdictions in West Africa—Nigerian, Ghanaian and the OHADA harmonised legal system of francophone Africa. He is also trained in diverse areas such as Sustainability Reporting, Social Enterprise Leadership, International Tax Planning, Development Finance ad Platform Business modelling (by such institutions as GRI, Netherlands; Beyond Profit, University of Cambridge, University of Leiden, Netherlands, World Bank Group and Center for Global Enterprise, New York, etc).
He is currently the Lead Partner at The Lodt Law Offices, Lagos, Nigeria.
Deji studied Law at under-graduate and graduate levels in the Universities of Lagos and Cambridge respectively, becoming the first Nigeria to graduate from the elite Master of Corporate Law programme of University of Cambridge, a programme which combines law school and business school modules.
His expertise have been used at committee and consultation levels by public sector, regulatory and self-regulatory institutions within and outside Nigeria. His work in this area includes:
- Leading legal advice on the expansion of leading Nigerian banks into countries in West and Central Africa as well as the in-market vertical expansion of Nigerian banks into other sectors of financial services (2005 – 2008).
- As financial sector specialist consultant to IFC, led a project for the legal compliance audit of the set-up of the National Movable Collaterals Registry of Central Bank of Nigeria, and user experience survey of an array of institutional users, including evaluating the impact of the registry on credit decisions and financial inclusion policies of major banks, producing a series of reports of, in aggregate, circa 200pages (2018 – 2019).
- Serving on the Legal Implementation Committee of Financial System Strategy (FSS) 2020, of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), where he worked on the Credit & Mortgage as well as the Financial Markets workgroups of that Committee (2007 – 2010).
- As a member of the Integrated Business Reporting Committee of UK-based International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN), served on the ‘group of 8’ global professionals selected to develop the ‘ICGN Integrated Business Reporting Guidelines’ adopted at the AGM of June 2015. ICGN is a network of the world’s leading institutional investors and their professional advisers together holding over US$34trillion in funds under management. Earlier, was awarded ICGN’s prestigious Deloitte Scholarship on Corporate Governance, as one of only 4 awardees and the only one from Africa in 2013.
- Assisting the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and National Orientation to conceptualise, and provided rapporteur services on the recent Conference on the review of tax matters in the draft Nigerian National Policy on Culture.
- As a member of the UNESCO ‘Pool of Experts’ on the 2005 Convention on Diversity of Cultural Expressions, participating in the international consultation on the integration of Technology and Culture into the post-2015/MDG global development agenda, under the aegis of UNESCO, UNDP and UNDESA.
Deji is a certified Sustainability/Non-financial Reporting professional by Global Reporting Initiative, The Netherlands, the world’s leading sustainability reporting framework providers.
Deji holds a Master of Corporate Law (MCL) of University of Cambridge, where he was the first West African to undertake the programme combining both Law and Business School modules.
Deji’s interests are in the Legal aspects of Financial Services & Transactions, Energy (Power and Oil&Gas) and Infrastructure, TME (technology-media-entertainment); Corporate Governance/Sustainability; and Taxation (especially tax planning). He has facilitated workshops as well as published and presented papers on aspects of these subjects across the globe.
He is a member of the Nigerian Bar Association, International Corporate Governance network, European Corporate Governance Institute, American Society of International Law, International Association for Conflict and Mediation and British Association of Planetaria. He is on the Board of a number of companies and not-for-profit organisations. He is a Global Scholar of Center for Global Enterprise, New York, and was a team leader of its Platform Business Model course in 2018. His hobbies are in literature and the visual arts.