The Corporate Affairs Commission has placed another 100,000 companies at risk of being struck off Nigeria's corporate register, marking the sixth wave of a sweeping compliance campaign that has already removed hundreds of thousands of companies from the national register since mid-2025.
In a public notice issued Wednesday, July 15, the Commission said the exercise is being carried out pursuant to Section 692(3) and (4) of the Companies and Allied Matters Act 2020, which empowers the regulator to remove companies it has reasonable cause to believe are no longer carrying on business or are not in operation.
Affected companies have 90 days to update their records by filing all outstanding annual returns, including information on Persons with Significant Control, also known as beneficial ownership details. The Commission warned that defaulting companies would not get a second chance, with evidence of compliance required to be sent to a designated email address at the CAC.
Each wave of the campaign has targeted roughly 100,000 companies, with affected firms typically singled out after years of inactivity or repeated failure to meet statutory obligations, particularly filing annual returns and disclosing Persons with Significant Control. Under CAMA, companies are required to file annual returns within 42 days of their annual general meetings, an obligation a significant portion of Nigeria's registered corporate population has either ignored or been unable to meet.
The scale of the campaign reflects a broader effort by the CAC to sanitise a national corporate register that had ballooned to include vast numbers of dormant or phantom entities, undermining efforts to track beneficial ownership, combat money laundering and present an accurate picture of Nigeria's private sector to investors and regulators. The Beneficial Ownership disclosure requirement, formally known as the Persons with Significant Control obligation, is part of a wider push under Nigeria's anti-money laundering and financial transparency framework to identify the real humans behind corporate structures rather than only their registered directors.
Business owners are advised to visit the CAC's official portal at cac.gov.ng to check the Batch 6 list and verify whether their company is among those slated for deregistration before the 90-day window closes.
The notice lands at a moment when Nigeria is simultaneously trying to improve its ease of doing business rankings and crack down on regulatory non-compliance, two goals that sit in some tension when the primary enforcement tool is the threat of erasure from the corporate register. For the thousands of businesses on the Batch 6 list that are genuinely active but administratively negligent, the 90-day window is a lifeline. For the shell companies, dormant entities and abandoned registrations that make up the bulk of every previous batch, it is simply the final step in a process that was always going to end this way. The CAC has now run this exercise six times without visibly slowing its pipeline of non-compliant targets, which raises a question the regulator has not yet answered publicly: how many more batches remain.
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