Two Nigerian banks listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) will be affected by the Central Bank of Nigeria’s latest audit of lenders, said Ndi Okereke-Onyiuke, the Director-General of the Nigerian Stock Exchange.
Okereke-Onyiuke, who addressed brokers on the floor of the Nigerian Stock Exchange in Lagos, the commercial capital, did not name the banks. The audit report by the Abuja-based central bank will be announced later today or tomorrow, she said, without specifying how the lenders would be affected.
“Only two of our quoted banks will be involved, but there will not be too much controversy,” she said.
On Aug. 14, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) fired the chief executive officers of Afribank Plc, Intercontinental Bank Plc, Oceanic Bank Plc, Finbank Plc and Union Bank Plc and injected NGN420 billion (USD2.8 billion) into the banks to keep them afloat after an audit of 10 lenders showed the five banks faced collapse because of mounting bad debts.
ThisDay, a Lagos-based newspaper, reported today that the Central Bank of Nigeria may dismiss the CEOs of at least two more banks amid a liquidity crisis in the banking industry. The heads of Bank PHB Plc and Spring Bank Plc may be sacked, the newspaper said, without saying where it got the information.
The fate of the CEOs of Equitorial Trust Bank Ltd., Wema Bank Plc and Unity Bank Plc was undecided, the newspaper said.
Lamido Sanusi, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, has invited the chairmen and CEOs of the affected banks for a meeting today in Abuja, the capital, where some of the measures may be announced, ThisDay said.
Nigeria’s banks may have as much as USD10 billion of toxic assets, Eurasia Group, a New York-based research company, said in May. Two-thirds, or NGN1 trillion (USD6.8 billion) of that bad debt, is partly the result of margin loans used to buy equities as they soared almost 13-fold since 2000, according to Bank of America Corp. The Nigerian Stock Exchange’s All-Share index fell 46% in 2008 and has lost 32% so far this year.
Read more on Banking in Nigeria
Intercontinental Bank | Union Bank | Oceanic Bank | First Inland Bank (FinBank) | Afribank | Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) | Bank PHB | Spring Bank | Equitorial Trust Bank | Wema Bank | Unity Bank | Eurasia Group
Source(s): Bloomberg News
