…injects $325.64m into retail SMIS
The Bankers’ Committee has announced that the Central Bank of Nigeria will begin to penalise exporters who fail to repatriate foreign exchange proceeds from their international business.
The Managing Director, Citibank Nigeria, Mr. Akin Dawodu, explained that a provision in the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Foreign Exchange Manual mandates all exporters to repatriate export proceeds back to the country to support the local currency and boost the economy.
Dawodu said the manual provided a 90-day grace period during which all proceeds from non-oil exports must be repatriated to the country and all arrears cleared. He said after the moratorium, non-compliant exporters would be blacklisted and banned from accessing banking services as well as forex from the CBN.
The Managing Director, FSDH Merchant Bank, Mrs. Hamda Ambah, said the Bankers’ Committee also adopted a unified rate N360/$ for all Personal Travel Allowances, Basic Travel Allowances, school fees and transactions without commission.
She said the committee also urged bank customers to report any defaulting lender for appropriate sanctions. The banks are to buy dollar from the CBN at N357/$1 and sell to end-users at N360/$1.
According to the CBN manual, proceeds of oil and non-oil exports are to be repatriated into the export proceeds domiciliary accounts of their exporters’ accounts within 90 days for oil exports and 180 days for non-oil exports. Where this policy is violated, the collecting bank will be liable to a fine of 10 per cent of the Free On Board value of the transaction, including other appropriate penalties as provided in the Banks and Other Financial Institutions
Act.
Likewise, where the exporter fails to repatriate the proceeds into the domiciliary account within the stipulated period, the exporter will be barred from participating in all the segments of foreign exchange market in Nigeria.
Ahmad said many exporters, who benefited from the Federal Government’s support scheme, had continually failed to comply with this directive. The defaulters will be barred from accessing other banking services.
Director, Banking Supervision, CBN, Mr. Abdullahi Ahmad, said the apex bank was monitoring non-oil exporters and assessing compliance levels.
“The period of grace is gone and now is the time for heavy sanctions against defaulters. Defaulters will be banned from accessing banking services,” he said.
Meanwhile, the CBN has injected $325.64 million into the Retail Secondary Market Intervention Sales, to meet up requests in the agricultural, airlines, petroleum products and raw materials and machinery sectors.
The Bank’s acting Director in charge of Corporate Communications, Mr. Isaac Okorafor, said that the continued intervention was in line with the assurances made by the CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, to sustain market liquidity in order to boost production and trade.
According to Okorafor, the feedback from the wholesale and retail segments of the Nigerian FOREX markets showed that customers were satisfied with their level of access to foreign exchange. He said the degree of optimism displayed by all players underscored the fact that everyone was happy with the level of transparency in the market.
Speaking further, Okorafor assured that, with the recession now over and foreign reserves now standing at $42 billion, the CBN had enough in its arsenal to maintain the international value of the Naira, as well as guarantee access to forex by those requiring it to meet genuine needs.
He also reiterated that the desire of the Bank to ensure that all, particularly low-end users, had access to foreign exchange to meet genuine needs prompted the Bankers’ Committee, in its first meeting of 2018, to agree to sell United States dollars to those requiring it for invisibles at the rate of N360/$1, without any commission whatsoever.
It will be recalled that the CBN in its last SMIS, in January 2018, injected the sum of $304.4 million into the inter-bank Foreign Exchange Market.
Meanwhile, the naira exchanged at N361/$1 in the BDC segment of the market on Friday, February 9, 2018.
