The order- of -magnitude apportioned by Maya Angelou ,a poet and activist , to courage as a virtue is legendary . To Maya ‘ ’courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage ,you can’t practice any other virtue consistently” .Nothing could be more unassailable and invincible than this observation ; without courage it may be difficult to be honest .No doubt, the Central Bank of Nigeria ,CBN , under Godwin Emefiele , allegedly lacks courage to be honest and this is nothing but highly unethical . For this missing gap under his tenure , several allegations have been laid against him on several key issues since he became the governor of the apex bank .The latest one is on the controversial sales of Polaris Bank; this is currently generating raging storms around him and it surely boils down to his alleged lack of courage to be honest ; this is becoming highly worrisome .
Last week the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Asset Management Company of Nigeria (AMCON) announced the completion of the Share Purchase Agreement (SPA) for the acquisition of 100% equity in Polaris Bank to Strategic Capital Investment Limited (SCIL). The sale, incidentally , is coming barely a week after lawmakers in the National Assembly directed the CBN to immediately suspend the sale of the bank until the sales follow due process. . But CBN ,no doubt , ignored the directive , a situation the made some observers to believe Emefiele is acting on the power from the above following the usual allegation against him. . For some analysts, the sale and acquisition process fell short of best global practices for the sale of such assets. The worst part of this deal considered to be shady is that an attempt at discovering the owners of SCIL yielded no meaningful result. The transaction history and digital footprint of the sale process was also fruitless. The equity valuation (net asset valuation (NAV), discounted cash flow (DCF) or maintainable earnings valuation (MAV) have not been made public). SCIL has no publicly accessible profile leaving analysts concerned about the acquirers professional competence and character. Indeed the transaction appears to been tucked under a cover cloth of heresay, subterfuge and deflection. As background the CBN through AMCON injected N898 billion into Polaris Bank, a value that rose to N1.305 trillion in the course of business.
From the release on the present sale of Polaris Bank to SCIL, the acquirer has been told to pay N50bn while the N1.305trn would serve as a liability to be paid over 25 years. So what is the size of Polaris banks books? As of December 2021 the size of the balance sheet was N1.310trn without the 1.305trn AMCON exposure. The N1.310trn encompassed a share premium of N25.43bn which was down from the N873.45bn the previous year 2020 when the bank carried a reorganisation reserve of N848.01bn which suddenly vanished to zero in 2021. What does this mean? Analysts believe that as a bastion for the protection of public interest the national assembly (NASS) needed to have taken a closer look at the Polaris Bank transaction, because the brilliant financial engineers pulled of a smoke-and-mirrors trick even the great magician, Harry Houdinni, would have been proud of.
