Date Published: 10/02/09

Atuche, Bank PDP MD resigns, whereabout unknown

Bank PHB’s Managing Director, Mr. Francis Atuche, this morning hurriedly quit his office in anticipation of his sack by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

The CBN, P.M. News learnt, this morning in Abuja called an emergency meeting with the board of three banks found wanting in the recently concluded audit of the remaining 14 commercial banks it was probing.

BankPHB, it was reliably gathered, is among those penciled down for the apex bank’s hammer, a development which prompted Atuche’s preemptive resignation, on learning of his impending sack.
When contacted by P.M. News on telephone, BankPHB’s spokesperson, Mr. Charles Odibo did not come straight on Atuche’s resignation.

Odibo only said his boss and other members of the bank’s board left for Abuja this morning to attend a meeting summoned by the CBN Governor, Mr. Sanusi Lamido Sanusi.

But another reliable source in the bank confirmed to P.M. News that Atuche this morning, announced his resignation in a ‘farewell letter’ to the bank’s staff.

Atuche gave no reasons for bowing out as the chief executive, but said that: “In the course of my stewardship, we took decisions which affected all of us in different ways but they were in the best and overall interest of the bank”.

The chief executives and boards of five banks: Intercontinental, Union, FinBank, Oceanic, Afribank, were the early casualties of the audit of Nigeria’s commercial banks which the CBN embarked upon some months back to sanitise the sector.

Some of the indicted directors have been put on trial by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) for various offences, while the debtors of the indicted banks are also being hounded by the anti-graft agency to repay their loans.

The EFCC boss, Mrs. Farida Waziri, on Tuesday, said the commission had already recovered about N103 billion from bank debtors across the country.

The CBN boss, Sanusi, P.M. News learnt, was expected to announce the report of the concluded banking sector audit, and name the remaining indicted banks at a meeting scheduled for 11 a.m. today; but at the time of going to press, the outcome of the meeting could not be confirmed.