Managing Director of First City Monument Bank (FCMB) Adam Nuru has admitted that the bank made an error of posting N573 million into the church account of Prophet Emmanuel Omale.
Omale is the founder of the Divine Hand of God Prophetic Ministry with its church premises in Durumi district, Garki, Abuja.
The suspended acting chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) Ibrahim Magu is being probed for allegedly laundering recovered loots.
Among other allegations, Mr Magu is also accused of using Omale to launder funds abroad.
The Presidential Committee on Audit of Recovered Assets (PCARA) said Magu purchased a property in Dubai in Omale’s name, but the cleric has denied the allegation.
However, appearing before the committee last Thursday, Mr Nuru said the bank only discovered the money was paid in error upon invitation by the committee.
“On January 16, 2016, we made a return to NFIU which indicated that there was a transaction of an inflow of well over N573million. (N573,228,40),” he said.
“This return was said to be in favour of Divine Hand of God Prophetic Ministries Account No 1486743019.
“After that report, we conducted an investigation and discovered that the lodgement which we reported to NFIU was an error.
“The error was as a result of the fact that we were using a bank application called Pinnacle-7. However, we migrated from that application to a newer version called Pinnacle-10.
“Usually, when the bank intends to migrate from one application to another, we utilise weekends to carry out the exercise. The migration involves moving all the balances of customers from the previous application to the new application. The account of the Divine Hand Ministries was moved during that migration.
“It was that balance of N573million that was wrongly posted as an inflow into Divine Hand Ministries as reported to NFIU. This error was not peculiar to Divine Hand of God Prophetic Ministries alone but was also ascribed to 27 other accounts.”
