Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor Olayemi Cardoso has revealed that an audit of foreign exchange change transactions has uncovered invalid claims totalling $2.4 billion.
Mr. Cardoso who was speaking during an interview on Arise TV Monday said the audit done by Deloitte raised questions about the backlog of claims, which were not backed by documents.
“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.”
Speaking on the dust raised by his proposal to relocate some CBN departments back to Lagos he added.
“I think there’s been an attempt to sensationalise what is a normal process for any vibrant entity like a central bank. Bear in mind that as a national institution, the central bank has a presence in every state of the federation.
“A situation where a large number of technical skills are in one particular location to the detriment of others does not speak well. So this has been an attempt to realign that and to ensure that skills are moved from where there’s an overabundance to where there’s a great shortage of those skills. So that’s basically what that is about.
“And with respect to Lagos which you mentioned, from our perspective, it makes a lot of sense that the entities which we are attempting to regulate and need to be on top of that are based in Lagos and they should have the right skills from the central bank right next to them so they can adequately and effectively do their jobs.”
“It (CBN headquarters) is overpopulated. And with what we are doing right now, we are hoping that will also help in easing the issue of overpopulation, which it is.
“And quite frankly, anybody that comes to the bank and interacts on that level will see that it is. It is overpopulated. And we’ve got to ensure that we can manage potential issues that could fall out from an overpopulated environment.”
The affected departments are Banking Supervision, Other Financial Institutions Supervision, Consumer Protection Department, Payment System Management Department, and Financial Policy Regulations Department. 1,500 among workers at the CBN headquarters are affected in the move.
