The Managing Director and Chief Executive, Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC), Umaru Ibrahim has disclosed that the Corporation paid no fewer than N11.50 billion to depositors and other creditors of failed financial institutions across the country in 2017.
Ibrahim made this disclosure during the NDIC Special Day at the Abuja International Trade Fair with the theme ‘Enhancing SMEs in Agribusiness through Innovative Technology’, in partnership with the Abuja Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI).
Represented by the Director of Enterprise Risk Management, Peter Hyelamzha, he said that the corporation had made a full and final liquidation of dividends to depositors of the defunct Eagle and Financial Merchant Banks (in-liquidation), which increased the number of banks for which a final dividend of 100 per cent had been declared to 16 in 2017.
He stated that the corporation, in collaboration with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), conducted an on-site and off-site supervision of 25 Deposit Money Banks (DMBs) and one Non-Interest Bank (NIB).
The supervision, he said, was extended to 1,008 Micro-finance Banks (MfBs) and 38 Primary Mortgage Banks (PMBs) using the Risk-Based Supervision (RBS) approach and Consolidated Risk Based Examination (CRBE) of three banks with holding companies, in a bid to ensure financial system stability in the country.
More so, total recoveries from debtors of failed banks by the NDIC in 2017 amounted to N368.43 million, which brought cumulative recovery from debtors to N28.84 billion.
Recall that NDIC had threatened to impose sanctions on some DMBs for alleged fraud. While he refused to mention the affected banks, Ibrahim revealed that the erring banks have been making inadequate returns on their transactions.
The affected banks, according to Ibrahim, were found culpable for failing to submit full returns on cases of fraud and forgeries involving their staff who were either dismissed or had their appointments terminated on grounds of fraudulent activities.
The decision to probe the affected banks was sequel to a report from NDIC’s off-site supervision team about the involvement of some DMBs in fraudulent transactions.
The report shows that the number of the reported cases of frauds in banks increased from 231 in 2016 to 320 in 2017 which equals 38.53 percent above the figure reported for the previous year.
The findings which relied on a total of 286 responses received from 26 banks during the period under review revealed that by December 31, 2017, the banks made no returns of any fraud in 22 responses.
