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 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.

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 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.

 ...Punch