Information at the disposal of The Witness has it that the group managing director and chief executive officer of Polaris Bank Ltd, Adetokunbo Mukhail Abiru, is currently battling to save his head following series of petitions at the Presidency seeking his removal as the bank’s chief over poor performance.

This is coming even as the Asset Management Company of Nigeria (AMCON), is currently seeking new investors to take over the nationalised bank. In one of the petitions, a group, Integrity Movement for Good Governance (IMGG), urged the president, Muhammadu Buhari to beam its searchlight on the struggling financial institution, its current financials and the takeover of the bank.

In the petition signed by its president, Mr. Babafemi Adeniji, and titled: “Request for Presidential Inquisition into Polaris Bank Limited led by Mr. Adetokunbo Mukhail Abiru” the group said it was worried that like the defunct Skye Bank, the federal government is again on the brink of losing several billions of naira due to inexperience and lack of expertise of the management of Polaris Bank led by Abiru. “We believe a lot of water has pssed under the bridge at Polaris Bank.

Everybody wants to know who did what and how to put to rest all our fears about all the improprieties. “The bank is currently run by inexperienced lot.

It is time to sack some people and bring sanity into the place,” the petition read in part. Among the requests made by the group is for the president to probe the financials of the bank under Tokunbo Abiru in the last three years and also to investigate the irregularities surrounding the take-over of the bank.

Recall that on July 4, 2016, the Central Bank of Nigeria intervened in the management of the Skye Bank Plc (now Polaris) by reconstituting the board of directors, shoring up the bank with N100bn capital injection, and accordingly, the apex bank gave the board a clear mandate to turn the institution around positively.

The regulatory action on the bank led to the resignation of its chairman, all non-executive directors on the board, as well as the managing director, deputy managing director, and the two longest-serving executive directors on the management team.

Two years down the line, (precisely, September 22, 2018), the CBN again intervened in the ailing Skye Bank and the operating licence of the bank was revoked to give way to Polaris Bank Limited, a bridge bank created by the apex bank in consultation with the Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC), to assume the ownership of the assets, all deposit liabilities and some other liabilities of distressed and defunct Skye Bank.

Shareholder groups across the country reacted bitterly to the takeover of Skye Bank describing it as illegality and impunity on the part of the CBN and other regulators in the financial service sector.

The national president, Constance Shareholders Association of Nigeria, Mallam Shehu Mikail, faulted the CBN’s claim that shareholders refused to recapitalise the bank. “Since the composition of the interim board by the CBN in 2016, shareholders have been kept at perpetual suspense.

There has been no board meeting whatsoever. I recall that it was the apex bank that constituted the...

Read more at: https://secretsreporter.com/polaris-bank-sinks-deeper-as-stakeholders-requests-for-sack-of-ceo-tokunbo-abiru-and-petition-buhari/