By Emeka Ezekiel, Abuja

Wednesday, 20 Oct 2010

The Nigerian Import Export Bank has said that it has disbursed N126bn to finance non-oil exports in the last 19 years.

The Managing Director/Chief Executive, NEXIM Bank, Mr. Roberts Orya, who confirmed this in Abuja on Tuesday, however, disclosed that the bank had a bad loan portfolio of N10bn.

He noted that the bank had so far recovered about N620m, adding that it had engaged the services of security agencies to enable it recover the rest

According to Orya, “NEXIM has since its inception in 1991 to date provided funding for interventions to the non-oil sector to a cumulative equivalent of over $800m( comprising about N75bn and $340m) .The foreign facilities are largely sourced offshore from strategic funding partners.

“However, we have obvious challenges with some of the facilities that we have given out. When we took over last year ,we inherited a loan portfolio of N14.6bn .

“Out of this amount, N10.03bn was classified as a loss in line with the prudential guidelines. The prudential guidelines determine the quality of the loan as default is going on.This has been a major challenge to the management because if we have over N10bn outstanding, it calls for a concerted effort because loan recovery has continued to be the most difficult and highly difficult task for the management.

“If you look at this from the point that the total paid up capital of the bank is N17.2bn , and we have bad loan of about N10bn outstanding, then it is a task that must involve everybody.

“We are making very aggressive efforts to pursue these debtors. But the age of these accounts is also a problem. Some of them have been there for the past seven years. And the nature of these sticky accounts has hampered our recovery efforts.

He added, “However, efforts are being intensified with the help of security agencies to enhance recovery from these delinquent debtors.

“We have referred a volume of N4.5bn to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. These are the facilities that have criminal elements such that the debtors gave us dud cheques or where we have verifiable evidence that the loan proceeds were bad.”

Source: Punch