THE Central Bank of Nigeria has revealed how a commercial bank mismanaged about N4 million of the new naira notes in Ogun State.
The CBN said it also caught some banks hoarding the new notes in their vaults for no known reasons.
The Deputy Director, Banking Supervision Department, CBN Lagos, Kayode Makinde, disclosed this on Tuesday, during an interview with newsmen in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital.
While accusing some commercial banks of sabotaging the efforts of the CBN in making the new naira notes available to customers, Makinde, who led a team on the monitoring exercise in Ogun, they have been going round the State for the past three weeks to ensure compliance to the directives of the CBN as regards issuance of the new notes.
The CBN team leader asked Nigerians not to blame the CBN for the scarcity of new naira notes, but the commercial banks.
He stated that the team had uncovered a commercial bank that mismanaged new notes released to it by the CBN, threatening that such a bank and its officials would be sanctioned appropriately.
“We came across one of the commercial banks that couldn’t account for almost four million naira of the new notes and appropriate sanction will be placed on them,” Makinde stated.
Speaking further, he explained that “we saw some trying to hoard new notes,” but they were compelled to upload same into their ATM terminals, saying others had poor cash management.
Makinde said the bank officials were asked that instead of trying to ration the new notes, the should upload the ones they have and contact their Central Cash Management Unit, which has direct access to CBN.
“We came across instances of sabotage on the part of operators, we will take the case up and will be dealt with appropriately.”
Makinde added that the commercial banks were directed not to pay out the new notes via the counter, but other notes.
“Some of them did that and ran out of cash. Some of the branches deployed resourceful cash management skills and they never ran out of cash while other experience cash run out and are still waiting for their source,” he said.
