The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) says law enforcement agencies are investigating $2.4 billion unverified foreign exchange claims.
Governor of the CBN Olayemi Cardoso disclosed this while speaking during a press conference on Tuesday after the 294th meeting of the monetary policy committee (MPC) in Abuja.
On February 5, the CBN governor said he inherited a $7 billion FX backlog when he became the head of the apex bank in September 2023.
However, it was discovered that $2.4 billion of the sum was invalid following an inquiry into the transactions.
Subsequently, the CBN said all outstanding FX obligations had successfully been settled.
Providing clarification on the unverified claims, the CBN governor highlighted various irregularities, such as the disbursement of large sums of FX for requests never submitted and allocations made without the necessary naira backing.
He said there was an absence of legal validity and adequate documentation in these transactions.
Cardoso also stressed the gravity of these irregularities, labelling numerous transactions under investigation as “clearly unlawful”.
“We brought in Deloitte management consultants who took time and this really did take months.
“This is not something that happened overnight and a lot of this work was going on and people didn’t know but they took months painstakingly to go through all the documents, all the documents and to ensure that you know, they would have a report, which we could rely on,” he said.
In the course of that, of course, we determined that a number of these transactions did not qualify.
In some cases, you had some allocations that were made in millions of dollars, which were never requested for.
“We also had somewhere they had no naira and they were also allocated, you know, huge sums of foreign exchange and the list goes on. It was for that reason that we refused to validate those particular transactions.
“We refused to validate them because apart from the fact that documentation was not satisfactory, in many cases, they were outright illegal.
‘And the law enforcement agencies, of course, are now looking into those transactions that are, as far as we’re concerned, not valid to be paid.”
