Nairametrics| The House Committee on Banking and Currency visited the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON) yesterday as part of their oversight functions. During the visit, the Committee reviewed the 2016 performance of the corporation and highlighted some issues about AMCON’s operations, Punch reports.
First, given the rising numbers of companies who are indebted to AMCON, the Chairman, House Committee on Banking and Currency, Jones Onyereri, spoke against the Federal Government’s (FG) patronage of these companies. He further advised that these companies should not be given the opportunity to access FG contracts or patronage.
“The committee observed that it will not be desirable for the FG to continue to patronize individuals and companies who are hugely indebted to AMCON, while those companies on the other hand, refuse to repay their debts.”
As such, Onyereri proposed some measures that should be put in place to ensure that the FG patronizes only companies that have clean books with AMCON.
“We are, therefore, calling on the Federal Government to direct the Ministry of Finance to deduct at source the value of debts owed by such debtor companies or individual with expected receivables from the Federal Government. We also suggest that it may be necessary for such debtor companies to obtain clearance from AMCON as a prerequisite for Federal Government patronage in the future.” he suggested.
A second issue brought up by the Chairman was about the quality of loans acquired by the corporation from eligible financial institutions in the country. First, there were loans wrongly declared by the commercial banks in the first place. He said such loans must be recovered by the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Federal Ministry of Finance. Furthermore, loans without proper documentation and those which were unrecoverable due to packaging or state of the collateral should be reloaded back to the financial institutions since they were now making profits.
