Transparency Nigeria Group has urged the Central Bank of Nigeria to immediately dismiss the Chief Executive Officer of WEMA Bank, Ademola Ademise, over alleged fraud.
The group in a statement by Dahiru Mohammed, its communications Director, alleged that Ademise had grossly abused his office as CEO of Wema Bank and contravened several extant regulations of the CBN.
According to the group, Wema Bank, under Ademise’s watch, covered up a massive fraudulent scheme perpetrated by companies and proxies of the National leader of the All Progressives Congress, Bola Tinubu.
Calling for his immediate removal, TNG said, “In doing this, Mr Ademise failed in his fiduciary duties and allowed a powerful politician to use Wema Bank as a clearing house for laundered funds. ”
The group referred to a story dated November 23, 2020 by Peoples Gazette where bank records showed that Ocean Trust Limited, a company linked to Tinubu, shuffled billions of naira between its accounts with Wema Bank.
The newspaper documented the transaction between January and June 2019 on how Ocean Trust summarily moved N16.4billion from its operations accounts into a fixed deposit account all domiciled in Wema Bank.
This was after the court case involving Dayo Apara, a former Managing Director of Alpha Beta, a company partially owned by Tinubu.
Ocean Trust was specifically mentioned in Apara’s court documents as one of the firms allegedly used to siphon funds from Alpha-Beta, the controversial Lagos tax contractor.
According to the report, Alpha Beta received billions from Lagos treasury since Tinubu was governor. Apara claimed the firm received N150billion in the past 15 years from Lagos.
On January 2, 2019, Ocean Trust moved N1.5billion from its 0702892574 Wema Bank account to another 0122613238 account within Wema Bank. The description for the transaction was labelled “Closure proceeds”.
A week after on January 9, N800million was transferred to the same bank account. On January 16, 2019, N500million was also transferred to the same account. N1.5 billion, N800 million, and N500 million were transferred to the 0122613238 Ocean Trust account on February 1, February 8 and February 15 in 2019, respectively.
The same account got N1.5 billion on March 4, while N800 million and N500 million were transferred on March 11 and 18, 2019.
On April 3, the account received yet another N1.5billion while N800million was credited to it on April 10 and another N500million on April 17.
N1.5 billion was moved to the account on May 3 while N600million and N500million were credited to the account on May 10 and May 17 respectively.
On June 3, N1.5billion was transferred to the Ocean Trust account with another N600million on June 10 and another N500million on June 17.