• Thursday, April 18, 2024
businessday logo

BusinessDay

Nigeria doesn’t accept all Basel requirements, says Sanusi

CBN resumes dollar sales to banks left out of Tuesday deals

Nigeria doesn’t accept all requirements of the Basel II and Basel III accords for banking regulation, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, has said, according to Bloomberg.

While “they both have strong points” for regulating bank reserves, “some of the quantitative elements where you effectively allow banks to run any kind of models and to calculate their own risk and capital” fall short of what is needed, Sanusi said in Cape Town. “There still has to be some element of Basel I as far as that is concerned.”

Read also: 20 councils in Delta benefit from FADAMA

Rules from the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision requiring banks to hold enough capital to survive market turmoil without causing risk to the financial system, also known as Basel III, come into effect over the next five years.

Appointed central bank governor amid a debt crisis in the country in 2009, Sanusi initiated reforms to rescue Nigeria’s banking industry from near-collapse and fired the chief executives of eight lenders bailed out by the regulator.