Cameroon’s Supreme Court has restored an order requiring a local bank to block 140bn CFA francs (€236mn) tied to MTN Cameroon’s Mobile Money business, a decision that reaches directly into the pockets of the millions of customers who rely on mobile money for daily payments and transfers. The ruling revives a four-year dispute between the telecoms operator and billionaire Baba Ahmadou Danpullo. It also carries a financial sting: a penalty of 50mn CFA francs (€84,500) for each day the freeze order is not carried out, according to RFI, which reported the decision on 12 November. MTN had not been reported to respond to the ruling at the time of writing.
For ordinary users of mobile money, the stakes are practical rather than abstract. The restored order concerns money held for the company’s mobile money operations, which customers use for payments and transfers, so any freeze raises questions about how that business is funded. Neither the court documents nor MTN’s account of the effect on its services have been seen by DNE Africa, a gap that leaves the public without a clear picture of what the freeze means in day-to-day terms. The reporting reviewed has also not published MTN Cameroon’s competing view of the case.
The decision that has drawn most attention re-establishes the obligation on a local bank to freeze the money, RFI said. Ecomatin named that bank as Afriland First Bank, though those details come from that outlet and were not independently confirmed. In a separate ruling published in early November, the Supreme Court moved the litigation itself to Ebolowa, the regional capital of the South, RFI said. The cases will now be heard by the Ntem court of first instance and the South court of appeal, and Ecomatin dated that transfer order 28 October.
One public institution is watching closely. The Caisse des dépôts et consignations, Cameroon’s public deposit institution, is following the case and wants the seized funds to be kept in custody, according to RFI, a position that speaks to the broader question of how money caught in a private commercial dispute is safeguarded while litigation continues.
The origins of the conflict lie outside Cameroon. Danpullo, often described as the country’s richest man, holds investments in South Africa through his Bestinver group. After he defaulted on a loan from First National Bank (FNB), South African courts ordered the sale of several of his buildings, RFI said. Danpullo challenged those sales in Cameroonian courts in 2022 and had the bank accounts of MTN Cameroon and of the chocolate maker Chococam, a subsidiary of South Africa’s Tiger Brands, seized. His argument was that the companies share an institutional shareholder with FNB, namely South Africa’s Public Investment Corporation, the state-owned asset manager.
The legal path since then has not been straight. A court of appeal in the coastal Littoral region annulled the earlier seizures in February 2025, according to the Financial Afrik website, and MTN Cameroon has contested the seizures in court throughout. The Supreme Court’s latest intervention now restores the freeze that the appellate court had unwound, returning the dispute to the center of public attention.
Danpullo’s side has framed the outcome in emphatic terms. His lawyer told RFI the latest rulings were “a great victory for us”, but added that “the fight will continue at Ebolowa”, where he hopes for the definitive conviction of MTN, translated from French. That is one party’s view of a case in which the other party has not been heard in the reporting reviewed.
What happens next matters beyond the courtroom. The files now move to Ebolowa, where the Ntem court of first instance and the South court of appeal will take up the matter. Meanwhile, Cameroon’s authorities are continuing diplomatic talks with Pretoria to seek an overall settlement, RFI reported. The country is also heading for elections in February 2027, and mobile money is a large part of the payments system, as DNE Africa has reported in its coverage of mobile subscriptions across the continent. Further background on the ruling and the dispute is available at https://africa.dailynewsegypt.com/danpullo-mtn-ruling/. As the case proceeds, the question most citizens will ask is a simple one: whether a commercial fight between a billionaire and a telecoms operator can be resolved without disruption to the payment service they use every day.