Nigeria will not preclude foreigners from owning any bank in the country, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor said Tuesday but added that the government did not want to sell the five ailing banks.
“The principle objective of the Central Bank at this point in time and the principal focus is not to sell the banks,” Sanusi Lamido Sanusi told a news conference.
“We at the Central Bank will not preclude a bank from owning a Nigerian bank because it is foreign. We have said we do not in principle stand in the way of a foreign bank owing a Nigerian bank,” added Sanusi, who met foreign creditors in London at the weekend.
Sanusi last month dismissed the chief executives of five key banks for mismanagement and running the institutions into insolvency.
The CBN said the total loan portfolio of the five banks — Afribank, Intercontinental Bank, Union Bank, Oceanic Bank and Finbank — stood at 2.8 trillion naira (17.8 billion dollars, 12.6 billion euros).
On Monday 16 senior bank officials were in Lagos charged with economic and financial crime offences .
The nation’s anti-graft agency EFCC said it would enlist the support of International Police (Interpol) to arrest fleeing chiefs of the five ailing banks.
The CBN boss had announced the appointment of new chiefs for these affected five banks and a bailout of 400 billion naira (2.55 billion dollars/ 1.8 billion euros) to them.
“Once these banks are stabilised, our preference is for these institutions to have core investors that will run them professionally and put in place the governance system that will ensure that we do not have a recurrence of the kind of things that we had in the past,” Sanusi said.
Sanusi said the core investors could be local or foreign but warned that any interested foreign investor “must show a clear commitment to the Nigerian economy and the development of the Nigerian economy.”
He said that his London trip last week was particularly “to meet correspondent banks and creditors to assure them of the safety and soundness of the institutions (banks).”