Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, Governor Yemi Cardoso said the apex bank has discovered $2.4 billion invalid forex outstanding claims pressuring the naira and causing anxiety in the currency market.
Cardoso revealed this on Monday during an interview with Arise Television.
Cardoso claims that the CBN’s hired consultant discovered this during an audit, revealing several questionable transactions.
The CBN Governor said in order to present an accurate picture of the situation, the apex bank hired Deloitte to investigate the FX claims.
As per the Deloitte assessment, up to $2.4 billion of the backlog is made up of fictitious claims, some of which have claimants who are unable to produce import documentation, according to Cardoso.
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“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.
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