CBN fires officials involved in N8bn currency scam

The Central Bank of Nigeria on Monday said that it had
invoked disciplinary measures against its officials that were
involved in the N8bn currency fraud in its Ibadan branch.
The CBN, in a statement by its Director, Corporate
Communications Department, Ibrahim Mu’azu, stated that
some of the affected members of staff, mainly middle-level
officers, had been either summarily dismissed or placed on
indefinite suspension depending on the level of their
involvement in the scam.
The statement issued in Abuja read, “The Central Bank of
Nigeria would like to inform the general public of the
chronology of events that led the management of the CBN to
hand over some unscrupulous staff to the Economic and
Financial Crimes Commission for prosecution.
“During a routine internal audit of the bank’s cash destruction
activities in September 2014, the CBN Briquetting Panel,
comprising senior bank staff from different branches, noticed
some anomalies at the Ibadan branch and immediately
reported this to the bank’s management.
“On further investigation ordered by the governor, it was
discovered that a systematic scheme, which has been on for
several years, was being run in which mutilated higher
denomination notes originally meant for destruction were
swapped with lower denomination currencies.
“This practice, known as interleafing, basically labels a box
with a higher value than its true content.
“As soon as the bank’s internal investigations concluded
beyond reasonable doubt that some wrongdoing had occurred,
the affected members of staff, who are middle-level officers,
were, depending on gravity of offence, either summarily
dismissed or immediately placed on indefinite suspension on
October 21, 2014, and all handed over to the EFCC for further
investigation and prosecution.”
The bank also said that following the incident, a nationwide
audit of all 37 branches of the CBN were conducted, noting
that the outcome of the investigation showed that this was an
isolated scheme at the Ibadan branch of the bank.
The apex bank, the statement noted, would continue to
collaborate with the EFCC to ensure that the affected CBN
employees, as well as their accomplices in some commercial
banks, were brought to justice.
The EFCC had said on Tuesday that five top officials of the
CBN and 16 others were to be arraigned for alleged complicity
in an N8bn currency fraud.
The Head of Media and Publicity of the EFCC, Mr. Wilson
Uwujaren, said in an electronic mail on Sunday that the
suspects would be arraigned at the Federal High Court,
Ibadan, Oyo State, on June 2 for circulating defaced and
mutilated currency notes.
Uwujaren had said, “The Economic and Financial Crime
Commission has concluded arrangement to arraign in court
five top executives of the Central Bank of Nigeria 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 put in the dock 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. The
remaining 16 suspects are drawn from various commercial
banks that 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 becloud their sense of judgment and
responsibility, when they elected to help themselves to tonnes
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 be blamed 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 was
cornered and discreetly recycled by light fingered top
executives of the CBN at the Ibadan branch.”