The Nigerian House of Representatives has made a fresh directive to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to make sure that they fully suspend the planned sales of Polaris Bank, one of the financial institutions in Nigeria.
The House of Reps has also resolved that they would be setting up an ad hoc committee which would be intended to investigate the interest of the federal government in the bank before its sales.
This decision had also been following a motion of urgent public importance which had been moved by Henry Nwajuba on Wednesday during plenary.
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Mr Nwajuba had stated that there is a huge speculation that there is an attempt to sell the bank for N40 billion. He stated that such an amount is less than 4% of the money which had been used to bail out the defunct Skye Bank.
Africa Daily News, New York recalls that the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON) had bailed out Skye Bank and renamed it Polaris Bank.
In his motion, Nwajuba had revealed that the suspension becomes necessary to “avert public outcry and untoward reaction from critical stakeholders in the economy, foreign business partners, the banking community, depositors, correspondent banks.”
He stated that the “performance of the bank in the last 3 years shows that it has consistently been recording profit, meeting obligations, and improving performance ratios.”
Nwajuba stated that the deposit and total asset size of the bank are more than NI trillion, thereby making the bank a key player in the economy.
In another related development, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has declared that Nigeria has now become an exporter of rice following the impacts of its several policies and particularly its Anchor Borrowers Programme (ABP), even as it said it was working to boost the industrial capacity of the country.
CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele, who disclosed this while speaking at a seminar for Finance Correspondents and Business Editors with the theme, “Policy Options for Economic Diversification: Thinking Outside the Crude Oil-Box”, on Saturday, noted that the ABP has reversed Nigeria from depending on importing rice to now exporting rice.
