The Chief Executive Officer of Access Holdings, Herbert Wigwe, has been killed in a helicopter crash in California, United States of America.
The bank chief was killed alongside his wife, son and two others, it was revealed.
News reports indicated Saturday evening that the chopper was headed to Las Vegas when it crashed near a border city between Nevada and California on Friday night.
New York Times reports that no survivors have been located as of Saturday morning, the authorities said.
The Federal Aviation Administration said that the Eurocopter EC130 helicopter crashed at around 10 p.m. local time near Nipton, Calif, an unincorporated community about 60 miles south of Las Vegas in eastern San Bernardino County.
United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in a statement confirmed all onboard are dead.
FAA said no survivors had been found as of Saturday.
“We were made aware of a downed aircraft at approximately 10:12 p.m., on February 10, 2024. The scene of the crash was determined to be east of the 15-Freeway, near Halloran Springs Road,” the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement.
The FAA identified the helicopter as a Eurocopter EC 130.
The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the cause of the crash at the time of filing this report.
Mr Wigwe was born August 1966. He was Nigerian billionaire banker and entrepreneur. He succeeded his business partner, Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede in January 2014, till April 2022.
Wigwe started his career at Coopers & Lybrand, Lagos as a management consultant, later qualifying as a chartered accountant. After a stint at Capital Bank, he joined GTBank where he spent over a decade working in corporate and institutional banking, rising to become the executive director in charge of institutional banking.
In 2002, Wigwe and his business partner, Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede bought into what was then a small commercial bank, Access Bank – at the time, the 65th largest of the 89 banks in the country.
