http://thepmnews.com/2009/08/26/top-banks%e2%80%99-debtors-surrender-choice-properties


Top Banks’ Debtors Surrender Choice Properties
August 26, 2009 14:44 (57 minutes ago), 276 views

By Tokunbo Olajide

To escape the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, hammer, some top bank debtors yesterday scurried to the agency’s office in Lagos to tender title documents of choice properties, as a guarantee they would repay their loans.

A source at the Ikoyi, Lagos office of the anti-graft body confided in P.M. News last night that scores of notable bank debtors trooped to the premises yesterday to beat the deadline to pay up.

The EFCC’s threat to the debtors to pay up or face prosecution, the source noted, was paying off, as about N6.7 billion had been recovered, as at yesterday evening, from debtors of Oceanic Bank alone.

The one-week ultimatum given to the debtors of troubled banks to pay up expired yesterday, and the anti-graft agency has vowed to turn the heat on the debtors by going all out today in search of erring ones.

The EFCC Chairman, Mrs Farida Waziri, ahead of the start of the manhunt for the debtors, relocated to Lagos yesterday alongside 100 operatives and two units of mobile policemen.

At a press conference she addressed yesterday evening, Waziri said some of the recalcitrant debtors were secretly plotting “to escape arrest and prosecution for economic crimes.”

The EFCC boss, who cut short a briefing she was having with newly appointed CEOs of the five troubled banks on their debt recovery efforts, said some of the bank debtors were already on their way to court to seek protection against arrest and prosecution.

She, however, urged the courts not to entertain such pleas by debtors to get injunctions to make them immune from arrest and prosecution.

“While it is the right of every Nigerian to seek legal redress against perceived wrong, we would crave the indulgence of the respected members of the Nigerian Bench not to consider any frivolous interlocutory injunction application from bank debtors,” Waziri said.

According to her, the crime of the bank debtors goes beyond just their taking loans and not repaying, as that would have been a purely civil matter between them and the banks, for which the EFCC shouldn’t have been involved.

“What some of these individuals and organisations have done is pure economic sabotage, and we should not allow them to escape with their loot,” declared the EFCC boss.

Waziri explained that the EFCC was yet to arraign a total of 14 bank chiefs now in its custody because it was compiling the list of their loan defaulters, in order to be sure about them so it can arraign them as conspirators alongside the indicted bankers.

The EFCC, she said, was after the bank debtors because “some of them took loans without collateral, while others did so under fictitious conditions.

“So, money laundering and economic crimes come in; so that’s the basis. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s a civil matter. If it was civil, we won’t even come in,” Waziri said.

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They should publish their names and the property they surrendered(Address) for us to believe them. Most of them seems to be in denial but will go from the back to tender their property.