The Central Bank of Nigeria Governor, CBN, Olayemi Cardoso, has said that the Deloitte audit revealed that 2.4 billion dollars out of the reported 7 billion dollars of outstanding foreign exchange liabilities of the Federal Government are not valid for settlement.
Cardoso, who made this revelation in an interview with newsmen on Monday, disclosed that the bank had settled verified FX requests, which amounted to 2.3 billion dollars.
The CBN Governor noted that the current total outstanding FX obligations stood at 2.2 billion dollars, adding that he was confident that the outstanding FX liabilities would be addressed shortly.
Cardoso assured Nigerians that CBN would not pay for FX requests that were not validly constituted, adding that the bank has written to authorised dealers to explain the disparities identified.
He said, “And sadly, quite frankly, I think much of those have not been disputed to our satisfaction.
“The result that came out of this was startling in a great respect; it was quite startling. We discovered that of the roughly $7 billion, about $2.4 had issues, which we believed had no business being there – and the infractions from 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 and account parties that asked for FX and got more than they asked for.
“And those who didn’t even ask for any and got. So, there were a whole load of infractions there, which I said amounted to about $2.4 billion out of the $7 billion headline figure.”
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