From Ndubuisi Orji, Abuja
The House of Representatives, yesterday, resolved to summon the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria( CBN), Yemi Cardoso, over alleged “invalidation” of $2.4 billion contracts to manufacturers by the apex bank.
The House mandated its Committee on Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) to invite the CBN boss and the affected companies. The committee is expected to undertake a holistic probe of the contracts and report back to the House within three weeks for further legislative actions.
This followed the adoption of a motion by Zakaria Nyampa, Ojema Ojetu and Obed Shehu over the cancellation of the contract.
Nyampa, while leading debate on the motion, noted that “the Central Bank of Nigeria recently announced the invalidation of about $2.4 billion worth of forward contracts sold to manufacturers on the grounds of incomplete import documents.”
According to him, “the invalidated forward contracts were originally entered into about a year ago between various Nigerian manufacturing companies and the Central Bank of Nigeria to hedge against currency fluctuations and risks associated with exchange rates.
“Informed that having entered into these agreements affected companies bank accounts debited in Naira equivalents and letters of credits issued by the participating commercial banks, the Central Bark of Nigeria decided to dishonor the contractual obligations end cancelled the transactions, one year thereafter.”
He expressed concern that cancellation of the contracts is at a time of worsening national economic challenges such as galloping inflation, unemployment, increased poverty level and hardships, is not in the interest of the country.
“If sustained, the cancellation of the said transactions will cause the widespread collapse of small and medium companies and the exit out of the country of large corporations with all the attendant consequences thereof, ” the lawmaker stated.