The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has asked the chief executive officer, Valentine Obi, and two executive directors, Sulivan Akala and Ike Eze of e-Transact an electronic payment platform, to resign, BusinessDay can reveal.
The move also saw the immediate termination of the appointment of the chief technology officer (CTO), Richard Omoniyi and chief operating officer, Kehinde Segun.
According to a source very knowledgeable on the matter, the management were asked to resign following allegations of N11 billion fraud perpetrated on its platform by one Michael Obasuyi, CEO of Platinum Multi-Purpose Cooperative Society Limited against a major Nigerian bank.
The CBN has appointed auditors from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and Ernst & Young to go through the books of e-Tranzact.
The N11 billion fraud allegation comes from a petition written in March 2018 by Michael Osasogie Obasuyi, who is also the managing director of Smartmicro Systems Limited, to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) against a mobile and electronic company provider.
A statement from the EFCC in April 2018 disclosed that, the company implicated in the petition had also written a counter-petition against Smartmicro and Obasuyi, thereby leading the Commission to begin investigations into the activities of Obasuyi.
Smartmicro was alleged to have approached the company in 2012 for the deployment of bulk purchase solution called “Corporatepay” to facilitate payment of salaries of Delta State employees in microfinance banks.
It was also alleged that the company configured an additional outbound fund transfer solution called “Fundgate” in 2017, which required Smartmicro to maintain a pre-funded settlement account with a first generation bank for settlement of account it had initiated.
Obasuyi later confessed to EFCC in his statement to the commission to having committed the crime, stating that he created fraudulent and imaginary monies through the aid of Fundgate financial application from the company.
“Part of the money has been recovered,” the source told BusinessDay. The EFCC statement confirmed that the sums of N2,903,737,563.92, $37,992.87 and €18,538.09 found in Obasuyi’s accounts in various banks in the country were recovered.
“However, several watchers are also thinking that CBN has not been fair to e-Tranzact because they were not the perpetrator of the fraud.”
It also spotlights the question the CBN needs to address – what are the risk management frameworks in places like e-Tranzact, NIBSS, Interswitch and SystemSpecs? This becomes necessary as the companies become big players whose misdeeds can have systemic impact on the economy.
e-Tranzact CEO, Valentine Obi told BusinessDay in a phone conversation that “There is nothing like that please.”
e-Tranzact is one of the switching companies in Nigeria with reputable shareholders like Access Bank, Ecobank, Meristem and Africa Capital Alliance. Nevertheless, the company has at various times been at the receiving end of CBN punishment for flouting financial rules. In 2016, for instance, the company was fined N500 million.
