It took the management of First City Monument Bank four years to admit that it erroneously posted the sum of 573 million naira into the account of Prophet Emmanuel Omale, the founder of Divine Hand of God Prophetic Ministries, Abuja.
The Chief Executive Officer of Adam Nuru admitted the error while testifying before the Presidential Panel that has been investigating allegations of financial impropriety against Ibrahim Magu, the suspended acting chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.
The panel has been probing allegations of misuse of assets recovered by the Economic Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) from May 2015 to May 2020.
In the course of its investigations, the panel accused Magu of allegedly using Omale, to launder funds abroad.
But in his testimony before the panel, FCMB managing director explained that amount was credited to Pastor Omale church’s account No 1486743019.
According to Nuhu, the bank had just discovered the mistake upon the invitation by the committee.
“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),” he 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.
Pastor Omale, through his lawyer, Gordy Uche (SAN), filed a lawsuit against the News Agency of Nigeria, which carried the report, which he said was malicious, derogatory and libellous.
He declared that he does not own any foreign bank account anywhere in the world, and that has never received any funds from Magu.
