The Managing Director of First City Monument Bank (FCMB), Adam Nuru has appeared before the Presidential Committee on Audit of Recovered Assets (PCARA), which is probing former Accting Chairman of the Economic and Financial Commission (EFCC), Ibrahim Magu for alleged embezzlement and mismanagement of recovered looted funds.
The FCMB chief during his testimony explained that the his bank made an error by transferring ₦573 million into the church account of one Pastor Emmanuel Omale.
The ex-EFCC huncho was accused of allegedly using Omale, founder of the Divine Hand of God Prophetic Ministry, to launder funds abroad.
The accusation against Magu read that he had purchased a property in Dubai using Omale’s name as a front— an allegation the pastor has denied.
Nuru was reported to have said in his testimony last Thursday, that FCMB only just discovered the mistake upon invitation by the committee, which is four years after the money was posted.
“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.
“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”, FCMB said.
