Caption: Dateline- July 18, 2021 photo of Senator Uba Sani and the Managing Director of AMCON, Ahmed Lawan Kuru
Management of the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON), on Monday, gave a 30-day grace for all its obligors to come with a payment proposal of how they intend to offset their outstanding N4.4tr debt.
The commission said all is now set for the publication of a new list of recalcitrant debtor individuals, and institutions, as well as their directors on its Non-Performing Loans (NPLs) portfolio in national newspapers, at the expiration of the grace period on January 5, 2022.
The announcement, the corporation said, is in furtherance to last week’s directive of the Senate Committee on Banking, Insurance and other Financial Institutions, which called for another publication of the names of all debtors, including prominent Nigerians, as those frustrating efforts at fulfilling AMCON’s debt recovery mandate. The directive was given by committee chairman, Senator Uba Sani (Kaduna Central).
Only recently, the AMCON Chief Executive Officer told both the Federal House of Representatives and the Senate that about 83 percent of the total Non-Performing Loans portfolio is owed by just 350 debtors.
A statement by AMCON’s Head of Corporate Communications, Jude Nwauzor, said: “the corporation will have no choice than to carry out the directive of the National Assembly (and) will not be blamed having taken the pain to warn the debtors ahead of the planned publication.”
AMCON is saddled with the statutory responsibility of recovering all troubled debts owed the Corporation through the purchase of Eligible Bank Assets (EBAs) from Eligible Financial Institutions (EFIs) during the different phases of EBA purchases when the Federal Government established AMCON in 2010.
Consequently, the AMCON Act Section 50B (1) as amended states that, “notwithstanding any rule or contractual obligation as to confidentiality, the Corporation may publish, in the national daily newspapers, a list of debtors that have failed to meet their debt or other repayment obligation to the Corporation in connection with any Eligible Bank Asset acquired by the Corporation…”
