By Ekpeno ASUQUO
ABUJA Bureau Chief
|BUSINESS| The Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, Olayemi Cardoso, today, Wednesday, January 29, 2025, announced that the Federal Government has cleared the outstanding $7bn foreign exchange following a successful verification exercise by forensic auditors.
The CBN Governor disclosed this at the launch of Nigeria’s Regulatory Policy Framework organised by the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council.
The event, which was tagged the regulators’ forum, took place at the State House Conference Hall in Abuja.
Cardoso said that they are optimistic the clearance of the $7bn backlog would ease off the bottlenecks associated with repatriation of funds by businesses, multinationals and foreign investors.
According to him, the outstanding forex clearance took far longer than they earlier anticipated.
He said, “In addressing foreign exchange liquidity constraint, decisive steps have been taken to clear outstanding $7bn forex backlog to ensure that businesses, multinationals, corporations and foreign investors can repatriate funds seamlessly
“This initiative has restored confidence among market participants and reinforced Nigeria’s commitment to honouring financial obligations in a timely and efficient manner. Talking about the $7bn backlog, we have cleared the verified claims.
“We also looked at the unverified ones, and I believe that we are at the final stages of separating what qualifies as fully verified, and we will surely be paying out those money that have been verified by the forensic auditors. It is unfortunate, to be honest, that it has taken so long.
“But the truth of the matter is that there were a lot of practices that went on that really should never have happened in the first place. That said, we are going to ensure that we do what we need to do to strengthen our market and create a better trust in what you investors naturally desire and deserve.”
|TheNewsDESK|
CBN Clears Outstanding $7bn FX Backlog
