Tobias Sylvester
The Chief Executive Officer of First City Monument Bank (FCMB), Adam Nuru has admitted paying the sum of N573 million in the account of Pastor Emmanuel Omale, the founder of Divine Hand of God Prophetic Ministries in Abuja.
News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) had published a report of the Presidential Committee on Audit of Recovered Assets (PCARA), which probed assets recovered by the Economic Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) from May 2015 to May 2020.
According to the report, Pastor Omala bought a landed property valued at N573 million in Dubai with laundered funds on behalf of Ibrahim Magu, the suspended acting chairman of EFFC.
This was reportedly uncovered during an investigation on EFCC’s activities by the Nigeria Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU).
Reacting to the allegation in a letter by his lawyer, Gordy Uche (SAN), Pastor Omale filed a lawsuit against the NAN, and described the report as malicious, derogatory and libellous.
Pastor Omale said he does not own any foreign bank account anywhere in the world, adding that he has never received any funds whatsoever from Mr. Ibrahim Magu.
However, while testifying before the investigate committee on Thursday, FCMB managing director disclosed that the said money was credited to Pastor Omale church’s account No 1486743019.
Nuhu said the bank just discovered the mistake upon invitation by the committee — four years after the money was posted. He 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 discoversd 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.”
KanyiDaily had reported that Magu is being probed by Justice Ayo Salami-led presidential panel over allegations of corruption, insurbodination and re-looting of recovered funds under his watch as the acting EFCC chairman.
