HOW BANKS MAY SABOTAGE CBN FOREX POLICY

As many people are now saying “happy days” are here with the recent policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria to ease the hardship occasioned by the high exchange rate of the dollar to the naira as the Apex bank is planning to sell 1million dollars weekly to each of the country’s 21 commercial banks at a rate of N375 to a dollar to clear the backlog.

However many analysts and financial market observers have started picking holes in the development with many of them saying the government may have played into the hands of the “cowboys” in the country’s financial sector with the policy which they say is not well thought-out.

Global News investigations revealed that the 1 million naira intervention fund to ease the scarcity and high rate of foreign exchange in the country will not deliver the desired result as the boys the various commercial banks will definitely collude with their various Bureau De Change (BDC) and their friends and proxies to effect some round triping.

According to one analyst, all these bankers and their collaborators in CBN need to do is arrange with friends and families with valid travelling visas and get a travelling tickets from their friends who operate travelling agencies to come forward and get forex at 375 naira to one dollar and then re-sell to their BDCs or their friends who run BDC shops at a little above 400 naira to a dollar and quickly make some profits.” Imagine sourcing dollar at 375 naira and selling at 475 naira to BDCs.As a banker, if you sold 3,750 dollars to your BDCS friend at the rate of 475 , you would make cool 1000 USD just like that.Now imagine a banker selling 10,000 dollars in a month with that kind of arrangement or round-triping”.The policy will force down the exchange rate but just marginally because these guys in CBN and commercial banks are the ones that will feed fat on the policy”.

Another well-known financial analyst who spoke on the condition of anonymity shared the same sentiment, he simply told our reporter that the policy is set to fail from the word go because the “inside guys will not make it work as they are the the ones that will profit from the policy,all they need to tell you when you come to the counter with your travelling documents is that there’s no dollar,that it’s sold out.But you can get from the BDCs.What that means is that they are selling it to their own people in order to make some quick gains”.