How CitiBank Helped Hide N99bn FG funds

The Ad hoc committee set up by the House of Representatives to investigate and recover unclaimed funds trapped in various commercial banks has said that it has uncovered about N99 billion belonging to the federal government allegedly hidden in Citibank.

Chairman of the Committee, Uyime Idem, who disclosed this at the resumed hearing investigation, said it also discovered a total of N300 billion hidden in other banks in Nigeria.

Idem said the N300 billion was a fraction of the N1.2 trillion unclaimed funds in commercial banks yet to be discovered. He said the funds were hanging funds and failed transactions from government agencies and banks that have appeared before it, adding that the committee was trying to recover the money from government agencies and the banks. Idem warned that commercial banks who are yet to respond to the request by the Committee either to appear or submit documents risk being sanctioned if by Thursday they don’t show up.

At the hearing, the Committee, rejected documents presented to it by Citibank, accusing the bank of falsifying documents that contradict the ones earlier presented to it by the bank.

Members of the committee were not happy with the discrepancies in the documents submitted by Citi bank which showed different figures and number of customers from the recent documents submitted by the bank.

Mohammed Bio (APC, Kwara) said the action of Citi bank was criminal, saying “they had earlier submitted an account record of customers without BVN (Bank Verification Number) with several 11 people with huge sums of money. But today, they made another submission on the content but the figures and number of customers stood at 7 with just a little money to their names which makes it curious.

“What are they trying to hide or could this be an afterthought that they had to bring these new documents”.

But the Executive Director, Operation and Technology of Citi bank, Ngozi Omokeme said they had nothing to hide and that the documents submitted were not falsified.

She said “with all due respect we are not here to change any documents. Also, I am not here to falsify any documents. I did not submit any document that is outside what we have earlier submitted. The documents are consistently the same”.