‘How bankers defrauded CBN’

A member of staff of Wema Bank, Mrs Abosede Oyelakin, yesterday gave an account of how some members of staff of the bank allegedly defrauded both the bank and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) of over N340 million in the mutilated currency scam.

Mrs. Oyelakin is the first prosecution witness in the ongoing case against some CBN workers and staff of some commercial banks.

Speaking at a Federal High Court, Ibadan, yesterday, Mrs. Oyelakin said co-staff Ademola Oni and Esther Afolabi were involved in the process that saw the banks record a shortage of over N340 million in the mutilated currency deals between 2010 and 2013.

Oyelakin, who is the bank’s Team Leader, Inspection Department at the Southwest Regional Office in Ibadan, gave details of how the accused allegedly replaced several packs of N1,000 mutilated currency with N10, N20, N50 and lower denominations to gain over N340 million.

The transactions were carried out with 173 boxes which were supposed to contain N1.7 billion but fell short of over N340 million.

The boxes were safely delivered to the CBN, until a petition stirred up the investigation.

During investigation, the witness said about 95 per cent of the wraps of the currency were not signed whereas minimum of three signatures were supposed to have appeared on each of them.

She revealed that other bank records, including the Volt Movement Register, were used to trace the suspects.

According to her, the bank did not discover the fraud because it was already credited by the apex bank.

“What I also observed was that, though the wrappers were those of Wema Bank, about 95 per  cent of them were without signatures.

“Whereas what operates at Wema is that tellers sign on the wrappers from the branches, stamp and hand them over to the Head of Tellers.

“Then, the head takes them to the volt after he or she initials them to confirm that they are correct.”

The prosecution witness was, however, not cross-examined by defence counsels. The court adjourned cross-examination of witness to June 20.