Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ola Olukoyede, says the era of placing ‘Post-No-Debit’ (freezing) on individual and companies accounts is over.
The Chairman said this when the Small and Medium Enterprise Development Agency of Nigeria, (SMEDAN) paid him a courtesy visit at the EFCC headquarters, Abuja.
According to Olukoyede, the Commission will separate proceeds of crime from legitimate funds to allow businesses to grow in the country.
He said: Businesses, as growing concerns, have to grow. We have to allow them to grow. These are people having many people in their employment and if you put PND on their accounts, they cant work, they cant grow, they cant operate, they cant pay salary and they will sack their employees. How does that help the economy?
The Chairman however, warned that the EFCC would deploy the full wrath of the law on any business that was set up to destroy the economy.
He also noted that If any nation is going to grow economically, you must place your small and medium scale enterprises where they belong, support them, create an enabling environment for them to thrive and that is exactly what we are going to do with our partnership with you.
Meanwhile, speaking earlier, the SMEDAN Director-General, Charles Odii, pointed out that his team was there to find out about two things. The first, he said, was that there are 40 million businesses that they represent as their vanguard, and so they want to know if they can trust the new EFCC.
According to him, they wanted to know if the EFCC is not going to contribute to the demise of small businesses. Our latest report shows that we lost three million businesses; and this has to do with insecurity, fraud, global competitiveness and lack of ease-of-doing business in Nigeria, he stressed.
