The Central Bank of Nigeria governor, Olayemi Cardoso said yesterday that security agencies have launched a probe into a $2.4 billion foreign exchange scam. He explained that the sum is among foreign exchange requests for transactions deemed ineligible for payment. Cardoso said: “Aside from unsatisfactory documentation in many cases, they were outright illegal. 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 stated this after the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting held in Abuja yesterday. He said some allocations worth millions of dollars were disbursed without corresponding requests, and some transactions lacked proper documentation or were outright illegal.
Cardoso said the scam was uncovered after a meticulous forensic audit, which revealed discrepancies. The CBN had engaged management consultants Deloitte to conduct a forensic analysis spanning months to determine legitimate requests among a backlog. The firm established that several transactions failed to meet the validation criteria. Cardoso said: “In the course of that forensic audit, we determined that a number of these transactions did not qualify. In some cases, some allocations were made in millions of dollars which were never requested for. You also had somewhere they had no Naira, and they were allocated huge sums in foreign exchange and the list goes on. It was for that reason that we refused to validate those transactions.”
