The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Yemi Cardoso, has announced that a $2.4 billion scam involving false foreign exchange claims has been uncovered.
The scam has had a negative impact on the naira and has caused concern in the currency market.
The discovery was made during an audit conducted by Deloitte, a consulting firm hired by the CBN to investigate these claims.
The audit was part of a larger effort to increase transparency in the CBN’s accounts. It revealed a backlog of $7 billion in unmet dollar demand from investors and businesses, which Cardoso referred to as an “overhang” that could further weaken the naira against the dollar.
The Deloitte investigation found that $2.4 billion of the claims were completely fraudulent. Some claimants were unable to provide valid import documents, while others were companies that did not even exist.
“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.”
After seven years of hiding, the discovery of the backlog came to light during the audit of CBN accounts.
