CBN sets sight on outstanding $2.2bn FX backlog

…Deloitte audit revealed $2.4bn invalid backlog

Olayemi Cardoso, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, said that the apex bank has reduced the $7 billion FX backlog it inherited to $2.2 billion and vowed it was working to clear the outstanding balance.

“You can imagine that having $2.2 billion outstanding and $7 billion are not the same thing. We will clear all that is remaining very shortly,” Cardoso said in an interview with Arise TV.

Cardoso also made a shocking disclosure about how a Deloitte audit of the FX backlog revealed that $2.4 billion of the unmet demand was invalid.

“We contracted Deloitte management consultants to do a forensic audit of all these obligations and to actually tell us, what was valid and what was not. And the results that came out of this were startling. We discovered that about $2.4 billion issues had no business being there,” he said.

The governor said that there were several infractions noticed with the pending obligations.

“For example, not having valid imported documents, and in some cases, even entities that did not exist and in some cases, beneficiaries, account parties who had asked for foreign exchange, and got more than they asked for, and some who didn’t even ask for any and got,” Cardoso said.

Details later….