In a bid to salvage the sum of N888,301,598.15 alleged to have been taken illegally from the covers of WEMA BANK PLC,the bank has dragged twenty- six financial institutions as defendants before a Federal high court in Lagos urging the court to issue a preservative order urging the banks to salvage the unauthorized withdrawal funds.
In an affidavit written by the head of special Review & investigation of WEMA BANk PLC Kehinde Buari in support of an application filed before the court by a Lagos lawyer, It was alleged that,WEMA BANk PLC, experienced a system glitch on one of its core banking applications on 16th of January, 2025, which resulted in the unauthorised transfer of substantial funds from accounts held with the bank,as well as accounts held with the respective financial institutions dragged before the court. After the incident, WEMA BANK PLC,commenced tracing of the funds that were transferred without due authorization,while some of the funds have been traced internally, others have been traced to accounts held with the defendants /financial institutions
The bank’s initial investigations led to the tracing of funds to accounts held with some of the defendants,further investigations revealed that the recipients of these funds attempted to dissipate, hide and or obscure same by moving part of the funds to some of the financial institutions.
The bank took immediate steps to notify the financial institutions of the glitch and the unauthorised transfers of funds from the bank’s customers’ accounts to accounts held with the defendants.
The bank requested the beneficiary accounts held with the defendants to be immediately restricted/sequestered, in order to protect/salvage the bank’s customers’ funds.
Some of the financial institutions immediately restricted the beneficiary accounts and sequestered/salvaged a significant portion of the funds that were transferred out of the plaintiff’s customers’accounts without authorisation. The total amount salvaged by the said defendants is N888,301,598.15 (Eight Hundred and Eighty-Eight Million,Three Hundred and One Thousand, Five Hundred and Ninety-Eight Naira,Fifteen Kobo).
Further to the above, the bank’s Internal Audit and Legal Teams detailed the outcome of the ongoing investigations tracing the funds moved to accounts held with the defendants as a result of the system glitch.
Accordingly, an Internal Memo dated 16 January2025, and two summaries dated 20 January 2025 and 21 January 2025 were issued,showing:
i.Particulars of the sums transferred out of the bank’s customers’ accounts and traced to other accounts held with the bank as well as to accounts held by the respective defendant.
ii.Particulars of the beneficiary accounts in respect of the traced sums.
iii.Particulars of the sums salvaged by the respective defendants. Respectively copies of the bank’s internal memo, dated 20 January 2025 and 21 January 2025 have been filed before the court.
The investigation into the unauthorised movement of funds continued after the investigations conducted above.
Mr. Buari stated further that he knows that the beneficiaries/recipients of the unauthorised funds attempted to disguise/obscure the source of the said funds by dissipating same through an intricate web of transfers.
Following the conclusion of further investigations, the plaintiff traced additional funds to the defendants.
Due to the complicated and intricate nature of the movement of the funds from WEMA BANK,it became necessary to involve the Nigeria Inter-bank settlement system ( NIBSS)
