The Managing Director of First City Monument Bank (FCMB), Adam Nuru has said that the bank has discovered that N573 million was mistakenly posted into Pastor Emmanuel Omale’s church account.
The suspended acting chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), is being accused that he allegedly used Omale, founder of the Divine Hand of God Prophetic Ministry, to launder funds abroad.
However, while testifying before the committee investigating Magu for allegedly mismanaging and embezzling the loot recovered by the anti-graft agency, Nuru on Thursday said the bank just discovered that N573 million was transferred to the Church account of Omale by mistake.
He said the mistake was discovered upon invitation by the probe committee — four years after the money was posted.
“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,” Nuru said.
