THE Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Dr Yemi Car do so, has said the the Apex Bank has discovered invalid foreign overdue claims, totalling $2.4 billion, which have pressured the naira for long and spooked the currency market.
According to media reports, Cardoso said the discovery was made after an audit by a CBN-engaged consultant, Deloitte, brought several shady deals to light.
Recall that after seven years of being concealed from public knowledge, the audited accounts of the CBN became public last year during which auditors revealed a $7 billion backlog of unmet dollar demand from investors and currency users.
The Deloitte report found that about $2.4 billion of the said backlog are false claims, with claimers unable to present import documents in some instances.
“We had had reasons to believe we needed to take a harder look at these obligations. So we contracted Deloitte management consultants to do a forensics of all these obligations and to actually tell us what was valid and what was not.
“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,” Cardoso said.
