The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has set its sights on over 50 companies suspected to have benefitted from a series of fraudulent forex schemes.
According to the report published by The Punch, the EFCC forex allocation investigation covers between January 2014 and June 2023 and involves at least $347 billion allocated illegally to companies in Nigeria.
The Nigerian economy in recent years has been plagued with forex scarcity, a development which has led to the shutting down and relocation of many firms and the CBN owing FX backlogs and more.
Senior officials of the affected companies have been summoned by the anti-graft agencies. They have also been requested to make available, detailed documents of their foreign exchange transactions covering the last 10 years.
Recall the Special Investigation panel instituted by President Bola Tinubu to probe the activities of the apex bank during the leadership of the ex-CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, had indicted the apex bank Chief of illegally lodging billions of Naira into 593 bank accounts in the United States, United Kingdom, and China without the approval of the apex bank’s board of directors and the CBN Investment Committee.
The report also indicted some organisations, revealing how they abused forex allocated to them for the importation of raw materials while others were accused of being involved in” round-tripping” after getting forex at the official rates.
The report of the investigations panel led to the EFCC raid on the head office of Dangote Industries earlier this year. The company was said to be part of the 52 companies accused of illegally benefiting from Emefiele’s forex allocation while he held sway as the apex bank chief.
The breakdown of the forex allocation disbursed between 2014 and 2023 showed that the amount of $65.99 billion was disbursed by the CBN in 2014, $44.6 billion in 2015, $25.5 billion in 2016, $27.64 billion in 2017, $40.81 billion in 2018, $43.99 billion in 2019, $28.24 billion in 2020, $16.4 billion between January 2021 and September 2021.
Also, $17.38 billion was disbursed between October 2021 and March 2022, while $36.88 billion was released between April 2022 and June 2023.