…this was uncovered during an audit by the consultant the CBN hired, which exposed a number of dubious transactions.
$2.4b invalid FX outstanding claims uncovered — Cardoso
The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Yemi Cardoso, has announced that $2.4 billion of invalid forex outstanding claims have been discovered, which is putting pressure on the naira and causing anxiety in the currency market.
Cardoso revealed this during an interview with Arise Television on Monday.
According to the CBN boss, this was uncovered during an audit by the consultant the CBN hired, which exposed a number of dubious transactions.
Cardoso stated that the apex bank commissioned Deloitte to look into the FX allegations to provide a true picture of the situation.
According to Deloitte, up to $2.4 billion of the backlog consists of fake claims, with some claimants unable to provide import documentation.
“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,” 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,” he said.
