THE House Committee on Public Accounts is beaming its searchlight on the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and Shell Petroleum over alleged money laundering, fraudulent deductions, and other financial crimes by their staffs.
The committee, chaired by Mr Mike Etaba, dropped the hint during the hearing of a petition by Maiden Systems Ltd against Sterling Bank, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), and Shell Petroleum in Abuja.
The lawmaker, who received the police report on the issue Wednesday, assured that justice would be duly served to all the parties concerned in the matter.
Presenting the report before the committee, the representatives of the Inspector General of Police, Kabiru Yahaya and Sunny Amison, both Chief Inspectors of Police, said that after intensive investigation and arrests made on the matter, the aforementioned bank was found wanting.
According to him, after the arrest and extensive investigation, the bank could not provide evidence to counter the allegations made against it by Maiden Systems Ltd.
“In the course of our investigation, findings emerged about the issue of non-issuance of statements of account, fraudulent debits, and misappropriation of funds. More importantly, Maiden Systems Limited raised the issue of accounts,” he alleged.
“There are four accounts operated by Sterling Bank Plc for Maiden Systems Limited. Two are U.S. dollar accounts, while two are Nigerian NGN accounts.
“Major remittances are coming to the account of Maiden Systems Limited, to be signed with Sterling Bank and Shell Petroleum Development Company Limited. Now, we have cut-off records from Shell covering the period 2017 up to 2020. Shell failed, this is our finding, to supply the financial reports for 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024.
“Now, having regard to the complaint of Maiden Systems that it was denied the statement of account, we interfaced with an account officer, who gave us in writing that the company is being furnished with the statement of account. And I asked how, and he said electronically or by short message service. But there is no proof. There’s no proof to debunk that aspect of the allegation.
“Secondly, we discovered from the statement of account generated by the bank, not provided by the petitioner, or its counsel, or any third party. These are accounts and statements of accounts generated by the bank. Ordinarily, before an investigator, we did not just call for a statement of account to look at it and dump it.
“We looked at it holistically and saw the grey areas where there were discrepancies or where there are questions to be raised.”
According to CSP Amison, they discovered a Debt Service Repayment Account (DSRA) where money is being used to service the loan.
The loan offer, as of 2012, was $30 million. We need to understand that it was restructured in 2017, with capital and interest to arrive at US$30 million.
He said, “Having regard to the account, we, a team of detectives, started seeing debits from Maiden Systems’ account for loan repayment. We took it upon ourselves to ask the account officer who first came before us to explain the loan repayment, but he said it was a mere narration adopted while applying funds to the company’s loan account. We found this very vague and ambiguous.
“We discovered that about US$28.3 million was debited from this company’s account for loan repayment, but there’s no explanation.
“Particularly, on 29th September 2016, the sum of US$2,413,000 was debited from the company’s account, Account number 00148517716, for loan repayment with reference FT16271UZYO. On 14th November 2016, the sum of US$1.256 million was equally debited from this same account for loan repayment.
“While on 16th January 2017, the sum of US$28,302,140.59 was debited from the company’s account for loan repayment. And like I said, we’ve waited for the bank to provide account officers who have managed this account to shed more light on this. It is not our document.
“It is their own document. The facts are before them. If somebody has managed that account before and is no longer an account officer, they could call them, provide names since they are no longer in the bank.
“One of the account officers specifically wrote that the outstanding balance was about US$27.25 million, while the executive director gave us a figure of over US$30 million. That is to say, nothing has been paid, nothing has been debited to clear the loan.
“We equally discovered what the bank captured in the statement of account: in-branch transfer, account to account. And we asked, what does the bank or the account officers mean by in-branch transfer, account to account?
“We have come up with the recommendation that since the bank has failed to provide evidence for itself to debunk the allegation raised by Maiden Systems, evidence, as used so far from their own statement of account, corroborates the offences alleged: financial mismanagement, fraudulent debits, misappropriation of funds, and more importantly when funds are being moved that way, money laundering. We could not even go deeply toward the petitioner raising their petition.”