Usman moves to recover NPA funds in banks

Hadiza Bala Usman, the managing director of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) has assured that the authority will aggressively pursue all the funds trapped in banks to ensure that such funds are remitted into the federation accounts.

Bala Usman also said that the authority under her administration would ensure that all the debt owed NPA especially the debt owed by terminal operators and other leasors, is recovered and remitted into the Single Treasury Accounts (TSA) in a shortest possible time.

Usman, who revealed that NPA is having meetings with the Central Banks of Nigeria (CBN) to see that all the money of NPA is returned to the Federal Government coffers, also disclosed that the authority also working hard to see how the fund that is stocked in a mortgage bank is released. “We need a letter that states when the account was opened, what is for and all the other details of the account to enable us recover the money.”

NPA, according to her, has a huge debt profile that runs to about N10 billion and another $585 million debts, considered as bad debt. “All we need is to go through the legal process of considering them as bad debt and taking them out of our books. We also have debt that were accrued by terminal operators as well as debt that were accrued through the lease agreements we had.”

According to Usman, NPA is working on removing the debt that accrued by a leasor that was unable to have access to a piece of land contained in the lease agreement due to an encroachment.

“We will remove such fees has been put forward by NPA as a debt that is owed by that entity to NPA over the years.  This is because the fundamental to lease is that the leasor has to have access to the property and we believe that it is very irresponsible to force a particular entity to pay for lease that was encumbered by encroachment; topography or others.  We have identified the entire lease under this category and we will address them,” she promised.

The NPA boss, who stated that the authority would develop a framework for debt recovering, said that the authority has loss quite a significant through deliberate intention to avert payment of debts owed NPA.

“We also have indebtedness where entities owe NPA but at a point such entity will pack up and will not be found within the address given to NPA. We have quite a significant indebtedness in that area and we have develop a framework for debt recovering, to remove the bad debt and to have a proper position on what our indebtedness actually was.”  ‎

 

 

 

AMAKA ANAGOR-EWUZIE