The Central Bank Governor, Olayemi Cardoso said on Monday that the Apex bank has uncovered invalid foreign overdue claims totalling $2.4 billion, which have pressured the naira for long and spooked the currency market.
According to Cardoso, an audit by a hired consultant ‘Deloitte’ revealed the several shady deals.
The concealed accounts of the CBN became known to the general public last year after seven years of being hidden from public view, allowing auditors to reveal a $7 billion backlog of unmet dollar demand from investors and currency users.
“We had had reasons to believe we needed to take a harder look at these obligations. So we contracted Deloitte management consultants to do forensics of all these obligations and to actually tell us what was valid and what was not,” Mr Cardoso said.
“The result that came out of this was startling in a great respect. It was startling. We discovered that of the roughly $7 billion, about $2.4 billion had issues, which we believe had no business being there and the infractions on that ranged from so many things, for example not having valid import documents and in some cases, entities that do not exist.
“There were account parties who had asked for foreign exchange and got more than they asked for. There were some who didn’t even ask for any and got. So there were whole loads of infractions there,” he added.
