Officials from commercial banks in Abuja and Osun State have been detained by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offenses Commission (ICPC) on suspicion of sabotage.
Azuka Ogugua, a spokesperson for the ICPC, stated that the development was a continuation of the organization's clampdown on those who hampered efforts to make the redesigned Naira notes accessible to the general public.
The deliberate refusal to upload cash into the branch's Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) even when the cash was available and people were queuing at the ATM points led to the arrest of a bank official who is the branch service head of Stanbic IBTC Bank's Deidei Branch in Abuja.
The head of operations at the branch informed the ICPC monitoring team that the bank had just received delivery of the cash when they stormed the bank at approximately 1:30 p.m. on Friday to ensure compliance and demanded an explanation as to why all of the ATMs were not dispensing cash.
However, the facts that were made available to the ICPC personnel indicated that the branch had already received the cash around 11:58 a.m. and had either knowingly or maliciously refused to provide the cash to the ATMs.
In light of this, the ICPC team forced the bank to load the redesigned Naira notes into the ATMs and made sure that they were all working before arresting the culprit.
The ICPC stated that investigations were still ongoing and that the Commission would proceed with the necessary actions as soon as they were completed.
Another bank, FCMB, was busted by the ICPC compliance team in Osogbo, Osun State, where some ATMs were loaded with cash with their wrappers still on, preventing the cash from being distributed.
As a result, the team ordered that the cash be properly loaded and the wrappers removed.
However, when the team returned the following day to check on compliance, they discovered that one of the ATMs was still full of the wrappers that had not been removed from the cash.
The Bank's operations manager was apprehended and questioned.
In a similar vein, a security guard and seven Point of Sale (PoS) operators were detained during the ongoing exercise in Osun State for charging exorbitant commissions for cash.
However, investigations revealed that they obtained the funds from filling stations that resell the cash to the general public at exorbitant prices after collecting new notes from fuel customers.
The people who were arrested were providing information to the anti-graft commission in order to help with investigations and catch other syndicates that were involved in the hoarding and sales of the redesigned Naira notes.
