By Victor Ogiemwonyi
In 2010 when Amcon was being set up, I wrote an article in support of its creation but said 7 years was sufficient time to resolve issues and get out of the scene. I said, we must be careful not to make it, into another parastatal.
When eventually 10 years was agreed, we hoped this was good enough time. …
It has actually now become a parastatal… 15 years later, it now has 600 employees, owes the CBN N7trn, with over 10,000 law suits.
This is because, its resolution status, was altered… with its mandate to manage businesses and the fuzzy maths… it created along the way.
Amcon became a leasing company…. leasing Tank Farms and became a real Estate company managing properties… it even got into managing Airlines they had no business in, …
Arik Airlines, for instance, was a heavily indebted company but was operating, taking in cash … its debt was not an eligible Asset for Amcon to acquire…. From the testimony of one of the witnesses, in an EFCC matter in court, it was revealed that … Arik had exposure to a Foreign Bank with facilities secured with a guarantee from Union Bank of Nigeria.
Instead of letting Union Bank pay for its reckless risk taking, AMCON mysteriously took on the debt to save the foreign bank and Union Bank, taking Arik debt, as eligible Assets, which it was not, …in the process, triggered all the other loans from other Banks into an immediate repayable debt, crystallising into debt Amcon now had to manage… Arik was no longer able to get credit once it became an Amcon customer … the genesis of Amcon becoming the receiver manager … where they had no expertise of any type … we know what happened thereafter… EFCC is currently prosecuting some of the people in this magical management….
Amcon also created a fuzzy maths situation… they buy a Bank loan of say N100m for N60m… with maybe N50m worth of collateral… underlying it ….they recreate it in their books as an Asset of N100m and start charging interest on it …this is despite the fact, that most of the Banks already proactively inflated the original Asset to the N100m (funny interest charges and fees ) and expecting the same defaulter you have taken their Assets to come and service and repay the loan.
So, instead Amcon, selling off this loan, with the under lying collateral and collecting its N60m plus whatever they can get on top ….and cleaning that loan off their books, they became the new Lender, holding on to the loan and charging interest …this was how they acquired their perpetual life…
You can not blame them, they get almost N1trn infusion from Banks as premiums to Amcon, every year, to feed their bloated structure and operations, paying fat salaries and allowances …
there is no incentive to resolve and close shop.
Every other Resolution entity like it, all over the world, whether in the US or Sweden … have all done their clean up and closed shop… Nigeria’s Amcon is still going strong 15 years later …
