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The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Dr Olayemi Cardoso has said the apex bank under his leadership discovered invalid forex transactions amounting to $2.4 billion from over $7 billion backlog he inherited from his predecessors.
The CBN governor, who revealed this on Wednesday during an exclusive interview with Arise News TV monitored by SaharaReporters, claimed that the transactions were regarded invalid because they were created with a lot of malpractices and infractions.
Cardoso said the apex bank had settled about $2.3 billion and it remained only $2.2 billion as the remaining valid backlog.
He said, “When we came into the leadership of the Central Bank a few months ago, the issue of foreign exchange backlog, the forward backlog was something that we met when we came.
“Obviously, it was something that had been accumulated over a period of time and we met that when we came in and of course it is very important. A sovereign nation should be able to keep your integrity intact. And as a bank to be able to show that, we consider our obligations as obligations that must be met.
“Approximately US $7 billion approximately was what we were told that the obligations were, and we looked at these and commenced the process of starting to pay legal resources as we had them.
“We were settling some which we believed were valid and due for payment and obviously, this isn’t something we could just do in one shot or you have to take a bit of time. Now as we went along, we now had reason to believe that we needed to take a harder look at these obligations and so we contracted Deloitte management consultants to do a forensic of all these obligations and to actually tell us what was valid and what was not.
“And of course, we were committed to ensuring that we would pay all valid transactions. And the result that came out of this was startling. We discovered that of the $7 billion, about 2.4 had issues.”
He said the illegal transactions range from invalid documentation to contracting with non-existing companies.
He added, “We believed had no business being there and the infractions on that range from so many things, for example not having valid import documents and in some cases even entities that did not exist.
‘And in some cases, beneficiaries, account parties who had asked for foreign exchange and got more than they asked for, and some who didn’t even ask for any and got. So there were a whole lot of infractions there, which as I said, amounted to about $2.4 billion.
“We are not paying if you don’t qualify. For the validly constituted ones, we have settled about $2.3 billion, and that applies to the airlines and a whole load of different entities spread throughout our economy.
“We settled that already. OK. And then now what remains is about $2.2 (billion), that’s about what remains now to be settled and I’m confident that we will shortly be addressing those and be able to move on and make progress.
“Because you asked the question with respect to how we were dealing with those that were not valid, you ask that question. We wrote, as they were identified. We wrote to the authorised dealers to come in and explain what the situation was and where those numbers were different and sadly quite frankly, I think most of those have not been disputed to our satisfaction.”
