Posted by From BASHIR UMAR, Abuja on
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor, Professor Chukwuma Soludo has shed more light on the South-West owned Wema and Spring banks crisis resulting in the suspension of the banks' chief executives.
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor, Professor Chukwuma Soludo has shed more light on the South-West owned Wema and Spring banks crisis resulting in the suspension of the banks' chief executives.
Addressing the Senate Committee on Banking, Insurance and other Financial matters during an interactive meeting with the members on Tuesday, Prof. Soludo revealed that going by their positive rapid expansion, the Micro-Finance banks, whose current number he put as 716, would have reached over 21,000 by the end of this year.
Asked by the Chairman of the Committee, Senator Nkechi Nwaogu, to give an insight into the real reasons of problems encountered in both banks, the CBN governor blamed it all on 'internal squabbles and political mudslinging by the top officials of the banks and their political friends, who took pleasures in sponsoring some press propaganda of madness, which portrayed us in bad light for removing WEMA Bank's chief executive, Mr. Adebisi Omoyeni of his job."
He said: 'The crazy campaign of calumny almost made us (CBN) to loose our temper and take a legal action against some writers and publishers for libel and slander, but we thought that it was like a madman throwing mud at his child and killing him, so there was the need for the child's life to be saved before returning to the mud and remove the mud from his hands."
'To us, bankers, whenever politics set in and the real issues of business are thrown to the dogs or abandoned, and we derail into media campaign of blackmail, that business is definitely crippled. But as regulators, we have a responsibility to make WEMA Bank healthy so that depositors' confidence is restored and their interests protected. In that direction, bedroom squabbles can never deter us, and we will never follow the path of political madness," Soludo declared.
Soludo explained further that according to the investigative report of the Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC), WEMA's CEO was enmeshed in numerous offences, including obstructing information to the investigators, and that when he (Soludo) summoned him to CBN to answer some of the allegations he could not, but instead he went about sponsoring media campaign against the CBN.
On whether WEMA Bank still had prospects, the CBN governor assured the committee that: 'Not only WEMA but both banks have great potentials to move forward and we are ready to take any measure to protect them. We are even thinking of engaging a neutral expert, a northern banker to man WEMA for sometime, as we are getting the interim report before the end of this month (February)."
On the prospects of micro-finance banks across the country, Soludo announced that they would swell to three times the current size, pointing out that they would be given the chance to operate inter states, only if the owners deposited N1billion per state.
He assured that their operations would never be allowed to degeneration to the same level as that of the community banks established by the Babangida administration.