Senate has
vowed to publish names of importers and banks found culpable in ongoing
investigation into over N30 trillion alleged foreign exchange frauds
perpetrated between 2006 and 2017.
The
Chairman, Senate Committee on Customs, Sen. Hope Uzodinma, made this known on
the second day of meeting with representatives of all commercial banks, the
Central Bank of Nigeria and Ministry of Finance on Thursday.
He said the
committee had given documents containing names of importers allegedly involved
in the act and other details to the commercial banks to study.
According
him, as soon as the committee gets reactions from the banks, it will proceed
with further investigations on each of the importers.
“The Senate
is worried with the state of our economy and we have decided to investigate the
dwindling value of our Naira as well as the state of forex that is affecting
the economy negatively.
“We will
publish the names of importer and banks involved in this fraudulent act.
“The purpose
of giving the banks these documents is for them to go and identify the
importers that were their customers and work out ways of returning the
un-utilised portion of the foreign exchange allocated to them.
“We have the
names of the importers, how much was given to them and other details, which are
contained in the documents handed over to the banks,’’ he said.
The lawmaker
decried that the release of forex to fictitious importers had denied genuine importers access to Forex, causing
economic hardship.
He stressed
that “commercial banks were trusted and given dealer status, unfortunately we
were not able to see the importation that was made with the forex released.
“We profiled
utilisation of Forex within the period and went further to establish that
letters of credit for doing business were linked to companies abroad.
“We did not
stop there, we also went to Customs and there was no evidence of import duty
payment, payment of Value Added Tax and other requirements.’’
(Punch)
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