The head of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Yemi Cardoso, said that law enforcers are looking into foreign exchange deals worth about $2.4 billion.
Cardoso who mentioned this during a meeting in Abuja on Tuesday 26th of March explained that these deals are not eligible for payment because an audit found many problems with them.
During the audit, they found that some deals didn’t meet the requirements. Some were for large amounts of money that weren’t requested. Others were given to people who didn’t have the Nigerian currency, Naira.
Because of these issues, the central bank decided not to approve these transactions. Now, law enforcers are investigating them.
Cardoso assured that the market is still open for people to settle pending deals. He also mentioned that the central bank has already checked and settled some overdue transactions.
“the cause of that forensic audit, we determined that a number of these transactions did not qualify.”
“In some cases, you had some requests, which well you actually had some allocations that were made in millions of dollars, which were never requested for,” Cardoso said.
“You also had somewhere they had no Naira and they were also allocated, you know, huge sums, the foreign exchange and the list goes on and it was for that reason that we refused to validate those particular transactions”.
“We refused to validate them because you know 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.”
He emphasized that the central bank’s main goals are to stabilize prices and fight inflation. They want to make sure that ordinary Nigerians can afford things.
The Monetary Policy Committee recently decided to raise the benchmark interest rate to 24.75 percent to control inflation.
They also made some changes for banks to keep more money in reserves, which should help stabilize prices.
