By Wale Ajileye
Intrigues as anti-graft agency plans to storm financial giants over fraud-related issues
Bankers are like gnomes from a distance. At close quarters, they loom large like hideous ogres attuned to the art of passing currency from hand to hand, account to account, until it finally disappears. Perhaps it’s because bankers deal with too much money that they have become open to anything.
Consequently, too many bankers demean the profession that confers honour on them. There is no gainsaying the recent revelations about bankers’ complicity in the $115 million and $88 million slush fund scandals reveals the dishonesty of the country’s top bank chiefs.
In the wake of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC)’s arrest of Fidelity Bank and Sterling Bank Managing Directors (MDs) respectively, in connection with the illicit slush fund transactions, fresh facts reveal that the EFCC would be turning the heat on Zenith Bank, Diamond Bank, FCMB, First Bank and the United Bank for Africa (UBA) very soon.
The news doing the rounds is that the three are next on the EFCC’s list of organisations of interest in the ongoing anticorruption of war of the incumbent administration of President Muhammadu Buhari.
Consequently, senior directors and executives of the banks have started running helter-skelter to clear their names or prevent any mention of their role in the monumental fraud that characterised the immediate past administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan.
But their efforts, according to pundits, will be futile in the face of the EFCC’s uncompromising task force. We gathered that the EFCC will storm the banks the same way it stormed previous banks few days ago, to arrest senior bank chiefs over fraud-related issues.