Kingsley Omonobi
16 May 2008
THE CBN in compliance with the Federal Government demand has paid the contentious $462million shareholding in Africa Finance Corporation into an escrow account.
This followed the insistence of the panel set up by the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice to find out how the CBN came about investing the amount in AFC and whether Presidential approval was given for it.
Presidency sources who made the disclosure yesterday, noted that the return of the money and revelation from the preliminary report of the investigation panel set up by government which showed that the money was paid as CBN shareholding investment in AFC was intact.
However, according to the source, the interim report on investigations of the $462million paid into the AFC showed that firstly, the African Finance Corporation is not yet registered in Nigeria but has subsidiaries in Ghana, Hong Kong and Seychelles; secondly that Professor Soludo is Chairman of the company in his personal capacity not in his official capacity contrary to Section 9 of the CBN act.
Its other shareholders are UBA, Zenith Bank, Oceanic Bank among others.
It was further discovered that members of the board of the AFC included the Managing Directors of four of the leading banks in the country also in their personal capacity as well as two very influential businessmen in the country.
The report went further to show that about 75 per cent of the $462million used for the AFC transaction put at about N50billion, was money gotten from Nigeria as the CBN governor who is Chairman, Board of Minting Company, unilaterally directed the Printing and Minting Company to print the naira equivalent before it was converted to dollars and transferred to AFC.
Despite the return of the money to the CBN coffers, Vanguard learnt that the presidency has given the panel the go ahead to investigate how much was generated as interest and recover the money from the AFC deal.
Explaining the President displeasure over the matter, the source said that Yar' Adua was crossed that such amount of money was removed from the CBN without his knowledge noting that even though Soludo claimed former President Olusegun Obasanjo approved it, the withdrawal of the money last November, should have been brought to his knowledge.
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