Banks contribute N981bn to AMCON’s sinking fund since inception – MD

The Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON) has said that the banks have so far contributed N931bn to the sinking fund since inception.

The Managing Director of AMCON, Ahmed Kuru,who disclosed this in Lagos also added that during the 2016 financial year, banks contributed N136bn to the AMCON sinking fund.

The Central Bank Nigeria (CBN) and 24 banks operating of the had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on the establishment of the banking sector resolution cost sinking fund for AMCON.

Under the sinking fund arrangement, the CBN will contribute N50bn and each participating bank will contribute an amount equivalent to 0.3 per cent of its total assets as at the date of its audited financial statements, annually to AMCON for a period of ten years.

Kuru however lamented that the projection was that banks were going to grow at 20 per cent, which never came to pass.

He said: “In 2016, we had envisaged that the banks would have contributed about N288bn, but they actually contributed only N136bn. What we did was just to service the interest of our loan from the CBN.

We pray that the contribution to the sinking fund would improve and then our losses would begin to go down.”

Speaking on the performance of the company in 2016, Kuru said, “In 2016, our total recovery was N134bn. Not all of them are cash. N86.9bn came from cash collection and some debtors that felt that they could settle some outstanding obligation through forfeiture of their assets”.

“So, assets forfeiture amounted to about N30.4bn, while N8bn came from sale of properties,” he said.

The Chief Financial Officer, AMCON, Olugbenga Ataiyero, who gave a breakdown of the account, noted that the group losses were reduced by N57bn to N352bn at end of December 2016 from N295bn at end of December 2015.