By Fola James
The Managing Director of First City Monument Bank, FCMD, Adam Nuhu has admitted that the tier two bank mistakenly posted N573 million into the account of Pastor Emmanuel Omale, the man of God accused of fronting for embattled former Acting Chairman, Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, Ibrahim Magu.
Magu is currently being probed by the Presidential Committee on Audit of Recovered Assets, PCARA, over corruption related issues and one of the allegations is that he bought some properties in Dubai, UAE with funds Pastor Omale laundered for him.
Adam Nuru, managing director of First City Monument Bank, FCMB, says the bank made an error of posting N573 million into Omale’s church account.
Omale, founder of the Divine Hand of God Prophetic Ministry has however denied the allegations.
But while testifying before PCARA, the Chief Executive officer of FCMB said the N573 million was mistakenly lodged in Omale’s account when the bank carried out Systems Upgrade in 2016.
Nuhu said “On January 16, 2016, we made a return to NFIU which indicated that there was a transaction of an inflow of well over N573million. (N573,228,40),” the bank MD said.This return was said to be in favour of Divine Hand of God Prophetic Ministries Account No 1486743019.
After that report, we conducted an investigation and discovered that the lodgement which we reported to NFIU was an error.The error was as a result of the fact that we were using a bank application called Pinnacle-7. However, we migrated from that application to a newer version called Pinnacle-10.
Usually, when the bank intends to migrate from one application to another, we utilize weekends to carry out the exercise. The migration involves moving all the balances of customers from the previous application to the new application. The account of the Divine Hand Ministries was moved during that migration.”
FCMB’s chief executive stated that Omale is just one of its numerous customers who have been wrongly credited with unsolicited funds during such upgrades.
According to him “It was that balance of N573million that was wrongly posted as an inflow into Divine Hand Ministries as reported to NFIU. This error was not peculiar to Divine Hand of God Prophetic Ministries alone but was also ascribed to 27 other accounts.”
