Chairman of the House of Representatives ad hoc committee investigating activities of Development Finance Institutions (DFI), Hon. Emeka Anohu (PDP- Anambra) has queried National Economic Reconstruction Fund (NERFUND) for failing to recover 17.2billion debts.
At the investigative hearing, the NERfUND officials who appeared before the committee refused to disclose the debtors.
The committee further faulted NERFUND for deviating from its core mandate of providing long and medium term loans to entrepreneurs through commercial banks.
The committee also became worried that disbursement of the funds mostly was done directly by the agency themselves instead of following due process as prescribed by law which ought to be commercial merchant banks.
Rep. Darlinton Nwokocha (PDP-Abia) also demanded from the agency records of debtors and their accounts which he explained didn't reflect in the documents presented to them.
According to him, "if a company has a way of making a debtor disappear from its records, it shows fraud of monumental proportion", Nwokocha queried.
Nwokocha also accused the agency of deceiving and misleading the public by shielding the names of the bad debtors and making it seem it does not exist.
"Every information that concerns Nigerians as far as this committee is concerned must be declassified", Nwokocha reiterated.
Though, the Acting Managing Director of NERFUND, Dr. Ezekiel Oseni refuted the claim of the lawmaker, "though the name might not appear but that doesn't mean the account is not in their record so we are not deceiving the Nigerian people by making the loans disappear.
Oseni further explained that he has no personal interest in covering up anyone. "I am ready to provide all information as requested by your committee and I have nothing to hide", he submitted.
Rep. Victor Kolade (Ondo- PDP) also expressed concern over delay by NERFUND in the area of auditing its account books.
"Auditing is done yearly but how can you come here and tell us you are yet to complete the 2014 audit of your account records when we are already in 2017", he questioned.
In the chairman's closing remarks, Anohu condemned the processes adopted by NERFUND in giving out loans and also the nonchalant altitude exhibited by the agency in the recovery of the loans.
"The processes of giving these loans and non-recovery shows the activities are fraudulent".
On conclusion, the chairman of the committee requested NERFUND to furnish it with the following within 3 days;
Documents showing details of the 2billion loan, 2013-2014 audited accounts, names of organizations taken to EFCC in the area of default payments and actual figure of funds received from multinationals and how it was disbursed and the names of beneficiaries.
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