A prosecution witness, Omotayo Igbosanu, who testified as PW2, in the ongoing N8billion mutilated currency scam trial on Tuesday, January 10, 2017 told Justice Joyce Abdulmalik of Federal High Court sitting in Ibadan how officials of a commercial bank and former staff of the Central Bank of Nigeria conspired to steal N900million.

Igbosanu, a staff of the Currency Processing and Disposal Unit (CPDU), CBN, Ibadan branch, while being led in evidence by counsel to EFCC, Adebisi Adeniyi, said, “sometime in May, 2014, during one of the briquetting exercise within the CBN, Ibadan branch, the briquetting panel discovered in one of the cash boxes newspapers cuttings instead of unfit currency notes”.  

According to him, the discovery threw up a suspicion and the management of CBN, Abuja sent reputable team of internal auditors to Ibadan branch to carry out a full investigation into the case in respect of the abnormality.

“The internal auditors were mandated by the management of the CBN to scrutinize all the boxes in the vault in order to ascertain that there were no other boxes affected by the ugly occurrence.

“In the course of the audit work, a lot of boxes were found wanting in different categories. Some boxes were mixed with newspapers cuttings, while some were mixed with papers cut into currency sizes and were inter-leafed with corroded notes. The boxes affected were quarantined from other normal boxes.

“In view of the staggering discovery, the team of auditors came out with their report to the management of CBN which prompted a petition to the EFCC by the management of CBN and the head office moved to the Ibadan branch of the CBN from September to October 2014”, Igbosanu stated.

While narrating what happened in the course of investigation, the PW2 said that the management of CPDU gave approval to the EFCC to open the cash boxes for them to count those that are really legal tender and to separate them from those inter-leafed in order to attach economic value to them and to determine the variance as the case may be.

“106 cash boxes that contained N1000 denominations were discovered to be in error. Mathematically speaking, the 106 cash boxes were supposed to contain N1.06billion if they were not tampered with. However, when the available currencies were counted, only N106million naira was found, which means that N900million naira was lost.

Kolawole Babalola, Olaniran Muniru Adeola, Toogun Kayode Philp, Ajunwa Bolade, Samuel Ogbeide,  Tijani Olusoga and Olawumi Inyang were re-arraigned on November 14, 2016  over alleged circulation of mutilated bank currencies worth N8billion before Justice Abdulmalik of the Federal High Court, Ibadan

The case has been adjourned to January 26, 2017 for continuation of hearing.

Media & Publicity

12th January, 2017