How a Nigerian Traditional Ruler Turned a Riverside Home Health Agency Into a $36 Million Medi-Cal Windfall
THE CHIEF AND THE CASH MACHINE
In Abatete, a town in Anambra State, Nigeria, they call him “half man, half god.”
A videographer captured his arrival last December in a motorcade outside a newly built palace, shouting praises in Igbo and commending him for building the palace “free of charge” for the community. The palace includes a golden statue of the man himself. Social media posts and local news reports celebrate him for building roads and housing, sponsoring annual medical clinics, and providing food for the needy.
His name is Chief Nathan Ogbatue.
In Riverside, California, he is something else: the CEO of California Home Health Agency, a Medi-Cal provider that, according to Medicaid billing records reviewed by The Hindenburg Papers, collected more than $34 million—and possibly as much as $36 million—from California taxpayers between 2022 and 2025.
In the same period, Ogbatue and his wife, Agnes, acquired at least $7 million worth of California real estate. And the company stopped filing the annual utilization reports that would have allowed the state to verify how many patients it served, who treated them, and how many clinicians it actually employed.
No formal charges have been filed against Nathan Ogbatue, Agnes Ogbatue, or California Home Health Agency. Ogbatue denies any wrongdoing. “We worked really hard, to be honest with you,” he told The Hindenburg Papers. “If we were doing anything funny, we wouldn’t talk to you. I’m talking to you because I have nothing to fear. What I’m telling you is that we worked hard.”
He also insisted: “Our company has engaged in no illegal activity.”
But after a six-month investigation based on corporate filings, Medicaid billing records, real estate transactions, mandatory state reports, and interviews with former employees and fraud experts, The Hindenburg Papers has found a trail of documents and data that raises serious questions about how a small home health agency operating out of a Riverside strip mall generated one of the most dramatic Medicaid billing spikes in California.
The Palace on the Hill
Nathan Ogbatue was named chief of Abatete in 2012, around the same time he and Agnes began investing heavily in California real estate. In Nigeria, he cultivated the image of a philanthropist. Social media posts and local news reports celebrate him for building roads and housing, sponsoring annual medical clinics, and providing food for the needy.
Last December, a videographer captured his arrival in a motorcade outside a newly built palace in Abatete, shouting praises in Igbo, calling him “half man, half god” and commending him for building the palace “free of charge” for the community.
The palace, according to multiple reports, includes a golden statue of Ogbatue himself. It is a monument to wealth that, on its face, seems impossible to trace to any legitimate business enterprise visible to the public.
What is visible, however, is California Home Health Agency.
The Strip-Mall Agency
CHHA provides in-home medical care, skilled nursing, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and medical social services, funded primarily through Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program for low-income residents.
The company’s website makes no mention of Nathan or Agnes Ogbatue. When The Hindenburg Papers called the number listed on the site, a woman answered but declined to answer questions, saying it was a customer service line only. When we drove to CHHA’s location in a Riverside strip mall, the blinds were shut tight. A woman eventually answered the door and directed us to call Nathan.
Corporate filings list Nathan Ogbatue as CEO. Agnes Ogbatue appears in state records as an officer and as the person who, for years, filed the company’s mandatory utilization reports.
Then the reports stopped.
The Billing Trajectory: From $89,570 to $17 Million
The numbers tell a story that fraud experts say is difficult to explain away.
Between 2018 and 2021, CHHA received less than $2 million from Medicaid—a modest sum for a home health agency operating in one of the most populous states in the country. In 2018 alone, the company took in just $89,570.
Then something changed.
In 2022, CHHA’s Medicaid payments surged to nearly $4 million. The following year, the company raked in more than $17 million. In 2024, it collected over $13 million. Across the three-year period from 2022 to 2025, CHHA billed Medicaid for more than $34 million—and some records suggest the total figure could reach $36 million.
The increase was not gradual. It was a vertical spike.
“What jumps off the page is not the amount being charged for each service—it is the extraordinary volume of services being billed,” said Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions for Government, who reviewed CHHA’s Medicaid data at the request of The Hindenburg Papers.
Talcove noted that CHHA went from roughly half a million dollars in annual Medi-Cal payments to $17 million in 2023, while reaching “the very top of the statewide distribution for the frequency of certain nursing and home-health-aide claims.”
In other words, CHHA was not just billing more—it was billing for a volume of services that placed it at the extreme edge of what any home health agency in California was claiming.
The Missing Reports and the Vanishing Audit Trail
One of the most damning elements of the investigation is what CHHA stopped doing.
California requires home health agencies to file annual utilization reports with the Department of Health Care Access and Information (HCAI). These reports create a public audit trail—they show how many patients were served, what services were provided, and how many clinicians were on staff.
Agnes Ogbatue filed the first publicly listed utilization report for CHHA in 2013 and appears to have filed the mandatory form every year through 2019.
Then she stopped.
The California Health Care Access and Information department told The Hindenburg Papers that since 2019, it has not received a report from CHHA “despite continued requests.” The missing reports became increasingly significant as CHHA’s Medicaid revenue exploded into the tens of millions.
Mark Haskins, a fraud specialist and former investigator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, reviewed CHHA’s information and raised concerns about the company’s billing totals, its apparently small office, and the absence of mandatory utilization reports.
“If the CHHA claims over 100 clinicians on 1099s, submitting an accurate HCAI report would create a permanent, public audit trail showing an impossible ratio of visits to payroll, massive contract labor line items, or billing volume that contradicts their CDPH staffing ratios,” Haskins said. “However, by skipping the filing, they keep their aggregate utilization numbers out of public oversight data sets.”
In a separate assessment, Haskins was more direct: “In my experience, companies with unidentifiable employees, billing for a large number of services, and failing to supply a utilization report to the state for more than six years that would easily verify much of the information in question have all the earmarks of a fraudulent shell company that fabricates stolen patient and even NPI numbers to submit fabricated billings.”
The bureaucratic fragmentation of California’s Medicaid oversight meant that the failure to file reports did not stop CHHA from continuing to receive millions of dollars. Different agencies are responsible for collecting reports, licensing providers, and paying Medi-Cal claims. The left hand did not know what the right hand was doing—or not doing.
The Real Estate Trail: $7 Million in Two Years
As CHHA’s Medicaid revenue surged, Nathan and Agnes Ogbatue went on a real estate buying spree.
Between 2023 and 2024, the couple acquired at least $7 million worth of property in California. The purchases included a $2.7 million mansion in Riverside with a sports court, putting green, archery range, and pool; a $1.9 million beach house in Redondo Beach; and $1.4 million in other Riverside properties.
The contrast with Ogbatue’s earlier real estate activity is stark. In 2000, he bought a Riverside home for $330,000. For two decades, his property holdings remained relatively modest. Then, in the same period that CHHA’s Medicaid billing exploded and the mandatory utilization reports stopped, he and his wife began purchasing luxury properties at a pace that would require tens of millions in liquid capital.
The Redondo Beach property has its own troubling connection. Before Ogbatue took possession of the home, it served as collateral for the bail bond of Tamara Motley, who was sentenced to prison in December 2023 for submitting $24 million worth of fraudulent claims to Medicare. As of 2023, Motley was married to former Nigerian Senator Ahmed Ogembe, whom the Ogbatues named as a defendant in a lawsuit related to the sale of the Redondo Beach property.
The overlapping circles of Nigerian political elites, Medicare fraud, and California real estate suggest a network that extends far beyond a single home health agency.
The Lawyer, the Denials, and the Deflection
When The Hindenburg Papers approached Ogbatue with a list of questions and assertions, including the reported Medicaid billing totals, he did not provide direct answers.
Instead, he accused our reporters of being racist for asking how CHHA makes its money. He directed us to his lawyer, Wilfred Aka.
Aka, it turns out, was disbarred by the federal U.S. Tax Court and the Federal Board of Immigration Appeals. He was also suspended by the California State Bar in 2019 and 2020 and faced disciplinary charges last year.
A lawyer from King & Spalding—a separate firm—sent a long response to The Hindenburg Papers on CHHA’s behalf. She argued that CHHA provides professionally ordered and medically necessary home health care via “a network of more than one hundred contracted registered nurses, licensed vocational nurses, and home health aides.” She suggested that the pandemic drove demand for CHHA’s services and claimed that the company’s revenue increase in 2022 “coincides with a health plan contracting for additional home health nursing services.”
Haskins, the fraud expert, was not convinced. He raised multiple questions about the company’s failure to file utilization reports and the identities of its service providers. If CHHA truly had over 100 clinicians on 1099s, an accurate HCAI report would have created a public audit trail. By skipping the filing, Haskins argued, CHHA kept its aggregate utilization numbers out of public oversight data sets.
Ogbatue himself has denied any wrongdoing. “We worked really hard, to be honest with you,” he said. “If we were doing anything funny, we wouldn’t talk to you. I’m talking to you because I have nothing to fear. What I’m telling you is that we worked hard.”
He also insisted, “Our company has engaged in no illegal activity.”
But he failed to disclose an estimate of the number of CHHA employees, the identities of the clinicians who supposedly provided the services, or any documentation that would explain how a strip-mall home health agency generated $17 million in Medicaid billings in a single year.
The Broader Pattern: Nigerian Medicaid Fraud in America
Ogbatue’s case is not isolated.
In June 2026, the Justice Department was prosecuting 90 doctors over allegations of defrauding the U.S. healthcare system of $6.5 billion. Nigerian nationals have been repeatedly implicated in Medicaid and Medicare fraud schemes. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has arrested Nigerians for multimillion-dollar Medicaid fraud.
The scheme Ogbatue allegedly ran follows a familiar pattern: identify a public healthcare program with lax oversight, bill for services that are difficult to verify, avoid filing reports that would create an audit trail, and convert the proceeds into hard assets in another jurisdiction.
What makes Ogbatue’s case unusual is the scale and the visibility. He did not hide his wealth. He built a palace with a golden statue of himself. He arrived in a motorcade while a videographer called him “half man, half god.” He became a celebrated philanthropist in his hometown while, according to investigators, his company was billing California taxpayers for services that may never have been provided to patients who may never have existed.
The Unanswered Questions
As of this writing, no formal charges have been filed against Nathan Ogbatue or California Home Health Agency. The investigation by The Hindenburg Papers has raised questions, not proven crimes.
But the questions are serious and numerous.
How did CHHA’s Medicaid revenue increase from $89,570 in 2018 to $17 million in 2023? Who were the patients? Who were the clinicians? Where are the treatment records? Why did the company stop filing mandatory utilization reports in 2019, just as its billing began to explode? How did Nathan and Agnes Ogbatue acquire $7 million in real estate between 2023 and 2024 on a home health agency’s revenue?
And perhaps most importantly: why did California’s Medicaid oversight system allow this to happen for years without intervention?
The state’s Health Care Access and Information department says it requested the reports “despite continued requests.” The Department of Public Health licenses providers. The Department of Health Care Services pays Medi-Cal claims. No single agency appears to have connected the dots between a missing audit trail and a massive spike in billing.
“This case highlights broader challenges within the healthcare system, particularly concerning the management of public funds like Medicaid,” one observer noted. “Such a sharp increase in government payments may indicate possible misuse or signal the need for policy adjustments in service delivery.”
The Palace and the Taxpayers
In Abatete, the palace stands as a monument to Nathan Ogbatue’s generosity—or, depending on one’s perspective, to something else entirely. The golden statue gleams. The roads he built connect villages. The annual medical clinics he sponsors treat the poor.
But the money, according to investigators, came from California taxpayers—from a Medicaid program designed to provide in-home care to low-income residents, the elderly, and the disabled. If the allegations are substantiated, the palace in Abatete was built not on hard work but on fabricated billings, stolen patient numbers, and an oversight system that failed to ask the most basic questions until it was too late.
The Hindenburg Papers will continue to investigate.
The question now is whether California’s Medicaid administrators—the people who wrote the checks, year after year, without ever receiving a utilization report—will be held accountable alongside the man who cashed them.
The people who fall for Nigerian prince scams, as one observer noted, are usually grandmas. This time, it was the state of California.
This investigation was first published by The Hindenburg Papers on Aug. 31, 2026.