Magu probe: Our bank wrongly transferred N573m to Prophet Omale, says FCMB MD

The managing director of First City Monument Bank (FCMB), Adam Nuru, says the bank had mistakenly posted the sum N573 million into the church account of Pastor Emmanuel Omale.

Okay.ng recalls that the suspended acting chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ibrahim Magu, was accused by the Presidential Committee on Audit of Recovered Assets (PCARA) of using Omale, founder of the Divine Hand of God Prophetic Ministry to launder funds abroad.

The committee headed by retired Justice Ayo Salami said the former acting chairman purchased a property worth N573 million in Dubai using Omale’s name.

Omale said he indeed met Magu in Dubai earlier in the year but not for illegal activity.

The pastor said he only prayed with the suspended EFCC boss who had traveled to Dubai for medical reasons.

However, while testifying on Thursday, before the committee currently investigating Magu for allegedly mismanaging loot recovered by the anti-graft agency, FCMB MD Nuru said the bank just discovered that N573 million was transferred to the church account of Omale.

Nuru said: “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).

“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 utilize 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.”