The Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, has sacked all First Bank of Nigeria (FBN) directors and appointed new ones with immediate effect.
The apex bank had earlier queried FBN for removing Adesola Adeduntan as the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, and appointing Gbenga Shobo as MD/CEO designate without regulatory approval.
CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele at a briefing in Abuja on Thursday wielded the big stick by sacking all the bank’ss directors.
Emefiele said the bank had maintained healthy operations up until 2016 financial year when the CBN’s target examination revealed that the bank was in grave financial condition with its capital adequacy ratio (CAR) and non-performing loans ratio (NPL) substantially breaching acceptable prudential standards.
“The problems at the bank were attributed to bad credit decisions, significant and non-performing insider loans and poor corporate governance practices. The shareholders of the bank and FBN Holding Plc also lacked the capacity to recapitalize the bank to minimum requirements. These conclusions arose from various entreaties by the CBN to them to recapitalize.
“The CBN stepped in to stabilize the bank in its quest to maintain financial stability, especially given FBN’s systemic importance as enumerated earlier. Regulatory action taken by the CBN in this regard included: Change of management team under the CBN’s supervision with the appointment of a new Managing Director/ Chief Executive Officer in January 2016,” he said.
He said another action taken was grant of the regulatory forbearances to enable the bank to work out its non-performing loans through provision for write-off of at least N150b from its earning for four consecutive years, as well as grant of concession to insider borrower to restructure their non-performing credit facilities under very stringent conditions.
Other action taken included renewal of the forbearances on a yearly basis between 2016 and 2020 following thorough monitoring of progress towards exiting from the forbearance measures.
Emefiele stated that the measures had yielded the expected results as the financial condition of FBN improved progressively between 2016 when the forbearance was initially granted to the current financial year.
