The Central Bank of Nigeria, on Tuesday, said it has uncovered N4 million of new naira notes mismanaged by a commercial bank in Ogun State.
It also accused commercial banks of sabotaging the efforts of the CBN in making the new naira notes available.
The Deputy Director, Banking Supervision Department, CBN Lagos, Kayode Makinde, disclosed this to newsmen on Tuesday while leading a team on the monitoring exercise in Ogun.
Makinde said this week would be the third week of the monitoring exercise in the state in an effort to ensure compliance to the directives of the CBN as regards issuance of new notes.
He said that the CBN should not be blamed for scarcity of new naira notes but the commercial banks.
He disclosed that the team uncovered that a commercial bank mismanaged new naira notes given to it, adding that the bank involved and its officials will be sanctioned appropriately.
“This is the third week of ensuring strict implementation of our directive as regards issuance of new notes. We have banks, agents and super agents circulate new notes in the economy. The experience has been mixed, we saw some trying to hoard new notes, we compelled them to upload into ATM terminals, others had poor cash management.
“From our experience, CBN should not be blamed but commercial banks for scarcity. We caught some of them, with new notes in their vault, we compelled them to upload to their machines. We told them that instead of trying to ration, upload the ones you have and contact your central cash Management unit which has direct access to CBN.
“We came across instances of sabotage on the part of operators, we will take the case up and will be dealt with appropriately.
“We have given directive that they shouldn’t pay out new notes via the counter but other notes, some of them did that and ran out of cash. Some of the branches deployed resourceful cash management skills and they never ran out of cash while other experience cash run out and are still waiting for their source.
“We came across one of them that couldn’t account for almost four million naira of new notes and appropriate sanction will be placed on them,” Makinde said.
Speaking further, Makinde said two teams were dispatched to cover two senatorial districts on each day of the monitoring exercise.
He added that the use of super agents to swap old notes for new notes had been very effective in the state.
