BY CHINYERE OBIORA, LAGOS – The Managing Director of Unity Bank Plc, Tomi Somefun, says the bank is wooing prospective foreign investors as part of moves to reposition it for value added services to its teeming customers within and outside the country.
Somefun said talks have reached an advanced stage on the planned business deals meant to boost the bank’s profile as a major player in the nation’s financial sector going forward.
She said at an interactive session with financial journalists in Lagos that the on-going business discussions with institutions would add value to the bank for effective service delivery.
The Managing Director, who did not specifically name the financial institutions involved in the planned partnership deal, hinted that the bank is closer to signing Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).
She further said among the institutions that Unity Bank seeks to collaborate with is currently the second strongest infrastructure group in Asia, admitted that the bank had lots of issues to address arising from its being a product of 2006 merger that involved nine Deposit Money Banks.
Somefun listed the disturbing issues as bank’s capital flow and management crisis, with the most pressing being the legacy of Non Performing Loans (NPLs).
According to her, at that time of merger, Unity Bank had the opportunity selling all legacy loans to the Assets Management Company of Nigeria (AMCON) but eventually only sold less than N10 billion to them.
She explained that as at last year, the bank recorded the highest NPLs in the nation’s financial industry, adding that since 2006 when the bank commenced operations as an entity, it has spent so much time and energy at recovering outstanding loans from debtors.
Somefun said the distressing time deployed in recovering loans prompted Unity Bank’s decision to sell off the outstanding bad loans and clean up the books to enable it concentrate in strategies that would help grow the institution.
The Bank chieftain said the decision to write off all the bad loans impacted negatively on the bank’s 2017 financial year result, even as she noted that only October of the year under review operated at profit level.
Meanwhile, the Bank’s management blamed delay in filling its financial statements on certain inadvertent corporate actions, including the bank’s discussions with prospective investors that necessitated extensive reviews by the apex regulator.
The management said Unity Bank consulted extensively with the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) and Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to obtain deadline extensive to October 31, 2018 to file the account.
In his remarks, Executive Director, Corporate Planning and Compliance of the bank, Usman Abdulquadir said Unity Bank sold more than N400 billion bad loans to a privately-owned company.
Abdulquadir said CBN ratified and approved the huge loans before they were sold to the company, stressing that the decision to move the bank’s headquarters away from Abuja has impacted on its growth given that other commercial banks in the country have their head offices located in Lagos.
