Post by ukipa on Dec 5, 2011 5:52:30 GMT 4
AMCON, biggest fraud in history -Shareholders
Written by Friday Ekeoba, Lagos Monday, 05 December 2011
tribune.com.ng/index.php/news/32269-amcon-biggest-fraud-in-history-shareholders
The Asset Management Company of Nigeria (AMCON), set up to wipe toxic loans off the balance sheets of banks has been described as the biggest fraud in the history of the nation’s financial sector by the Independent Shareholders Association of Nigeria (ISAN).
The national coordinator, Sir Sunny Nwosu, who said this on Saturday in Ijebu Ode at this year’s national workshop of the Capital Market Correspondents’ Association of Nigeria (CAMCAN), noted that the “bad bank” had forced every bank in the country to cough out up to three per cent of their balance sheets for doing nothing.
According to him, “the intervention of AMCON is the biggest fraud. Its capital base is N10billion. So far, it has given out about N4trillion (to buy off non-performing loans).Every bank was made to pay to the tune of three per cent of their balance sheets for doing nothing. AMCON threatens all the banking institutions in the country. It is a bigger fraud than those who allegedly ran down the banks.”
The shareholders’ coordinator equally chided the Director-General of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Ms Arunma Oteh, as an outsider whose only success in the job was to take the capital market backward.
He also blamed the persistent low patronage of the market on policy somersaults and discouraging pronouncements of highly placed government officials and neglect of the plight of investors, particularly the minority shareholders.
On what should be done to rejuvenate the market, Nwosu explained that his association believed that the capital market would rebound if the regulators accept their mistakes and start all over again.
