Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) recently claimed it had identified individuals and organizations whose rapid accumulation of U.S. dollars recently accelerated the depreciation of the local currency, a report said. Abdulrasheed Bawa is the chairman of EFCC and claims that his group is currently targeting foreign currency speculators at Kano, Lagos Port Harcourt Enugu, Calabar, Kano, Lagos and Port Harcourt.
EFCC’s Ongoing Offensive Against Forex Speculators
According to the chairman of Nigeria’s EFCC, Abdulrasheed Bawa, the anti-graft body has now identified persons and organizations whose hoarding of the U.S. dollar sparked the recent rapid depreciation of the local currency, the naira. The claims by Bawa follow earlier reports of the EFCC’s raid of black market forex dealers operating in the Wuse Zone 4 area of Abuja.
According to the Daily Post report, intelligence has been obtained by the EFCC linking unnamed organizations and individuals with syndicates that hoard foreign currency. While the anti-graft body’s raids were initially confined to the Abuja territory, Bawa disclosed that a similar offensive against speculators in Kano, Lagos, Port Harcourt, Enugu, and Calabar is underway.
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) blames Nigerian foreign currency speculators for causing the plunge of the local currency’s parallel market exchange rate against the U.S. dollar. Bitcoin.com News reported recently that Nigeria’s currency dropped to an unheard-of low exchange rate at N710 per USD.
However, following the EFCC’s intervention, the naira rebounded and traded at around N650 for every dollar at the time of writing.
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