Top officials of the Nigeria Central Bank, CBN, colluded with officials of private banks to defraud the country of about N8 billion, an anti-graft agency has said.
The EFCC said on Sunday that it is ready to prosecute Patience Okoro Eye, Afolabi Olufemi, Kolawole Babalola, Olaniran Muniru Adeola, Fatai Yusuf Adekunle, and Ilori Adekunle Sunday, all top officials of the Central Bank from various states, after concluding its investigations.
Officials of private banks who colluded with the Central Bank officials will also be prosecuted, the EFCC spokesperson, Wilson Uwujaren, stated in a statement.
The scam involved the “theft and recirculation of defaced and mutilated currencies,” the anti-graft agency stated.The officials are set to be arraigned on Tuesday.
Read the full statement below:
EFCC To Arraign Six CBN Big Wigs,16 Others for N8billion Currency Fraud June 2
The Economic and Financial Crime Commission, EFCC has concluded arrangement to arraign in court, five top executives of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, implicated in a mega scam involving the theft and recirculation of defaced and mutilated currencies.
The suspects drawn from various business units of the apex bank are to be docked by the anti-graft agency before a Federal High Court sitting in Ibadan, Oyo State, from Tuesday June 2, 2015 to Thursday June 4, 2015.
They include Patience Okoro Eye( Abuja) , Afolabi Olufemi( Lagos), Kolawole Babalola (Ibadan), Olaniran Muniru Adeola (Ibadan), Fatai Yusuf, Adekunle (Head, Security, CBN, (Ibadan) and Ilori Adekunle Sunday,(Akure).
The remaining sixteen suspects are drawn from various commercial banks who were found to have conspired with the CBN executives to swing the heist.
All the suspects who are currently in the custody of the EFCC are now ruing the day they literally allowed greed and craze for materialism to be loud their sense of judgement and responsibility, when they elected to help themselves to tones of defaced Naira notes. Instead of carrying out the statutory instruction to destroy the currency, they substituted it with newspapers neatly cut to Naira sizes and proceeded to recycle the defaced and mutilated currency.
The fraud is partly to blame for the failure of government monetary policy over the years as currency mop up exercises by the apex bank failed to check the inflationary pressure on the economy.
The lid on the scam which is widely suspected to have gone on unchecked for years, was blown on November 3, 2014 via a petition to the EFCC alleging that over N6, 575, 549, 370.00( Six Billion, Five Hundred and Seventy-Five Million, Five-Hundred and Forty-Nine Thousand, Three Hundred and Seventy Naira) was cornered and discreetly recycled by light manipulated top executives of the CBN at the Ibadan branch.
The suspects, who were members of the Briquetting Panel, plotted their way to infamy on September 8, 2014, while carrying out a Briquetting exercise at the CBN Branch, Ibadan.
In banking parlance, Briquetting is disintegration and destruction of counted and audited dirty notes. By this practice, depositor banks usually take mutilated notes to the CBN in exchange for fresh notes equivalent of the amount deposited.
The depositor banks in this instance are Zenith Bank, FCMB, Wema Bank, Access Bank, First Bank, Skye Bank, Ecobank and Sterling Bank.
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