The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Mr. Olayemi Cardoso has disclosed that $2.4billion of the $7 billion Foreign Exchange backlog were invalid transactions.
Mr. Cardoso disclosed this while speaking during an Interview on Arise News Television on Monday, February 5, 2024.
He said, the apex bank has been able to
clear $2.3bn out of the valid $4.5 billion FX backlog with just $2.2bn outstanding.
The governor said, “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.”
“Some of these invalid transactions,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”, he said.
Cardoso pointed at overpopulation and the need for efficiency as reasons for the planned relocation of some departments to Lagos State.
He said, “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.”
