CBN loans: Fayose reads riot act to M/finance banks over discrepancies

GOVERNOR Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti State has ordered the immediate closure of any microfinance bank in the state that is found to have shortchanged the people of the state in the disbursement of Central Bank’s soft loans to small and medium scale enterprises.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) recently commenced the disbursement of the second tranche of CBN’s soft loans to small and medium scale enterprises (SMES) in the state.

Some of the beneficiaries of the soft loans, who said they were supposed to receive N100,000 they had signed for, alleged that they got as low as N66,000 from the disbursing banks.

The beneficiaries claimed that the banks were not giving reasons for the alleged discrepancy in the amounts actually disbursed by them.

When Governor Fayose met with management teams of affected microfinance banks and some of the affected customers, in Ado Ekiti, he demanded that all the anomalies and discrepancies in the disbursement of the loans be corrected forthwith.

Governor Fayose, in his observations, also frowned on the act of deducting one-month repayment upfront from the beneficiaries as said to be carried out by the banks.

According to Fayose, what the banks deducted was much more than a month’s upfront repayment, saying “some people only wanted to defraud innocent beneficiaries of the special intervention fund.”

He said: “Part of my duty is to defend the people and we won’t fold our arms and allow some people take advantage of others. I held a meeting with these banks and they gave me the assurance that they would handle everything well before I signed to get the money from the CBN.

“If they can’t handle it, let us return the money to the CBN. Any bank, state or bank official indicted will be dealt with. The bank will be shut down and the officials duly punished. While we won’t condone beneficiaries not repaying or seeing the money as a kind of largesse. We won’t also allow for cheating on anybody.”

The Managing Director of one of the banks, Mr Tope Omojola, while explaining the deductions, said the mistake had come from their software provider that he said had debited the customers’ accounts twice.

Omojola added that the error was being corrected.

Ekiti State had earlier received N500 million in the first tranche of the loans and the same amount for the second tranche out of the total of N2 billion it is expected to benefit from the programme.