By Franklin Alli

The Bank of Industry, BOI, has called on commercial and development banks in the country to beware of dealing with bad corporate customers on its red book and who are now on the prowl.

Rasheed Olaoluwa, Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of BOI, made the call in Lagos during the launch of the bank’s Hall of Fame and the unveiling of ten companies from various sectors of the economy into the Hall of Fame.

According to him, while the BOI Hall of Fame was established by the management of the bank to honour companies who took loans from the bank and have fully repaid the loans granted to them as and when due, a total of 24 companies have willfully refused to repay the loans granted to them by bank.

“These people are like virus. We want to make sure they don’t circulate in the Nigerian banking system. What usually happen is that somebody takes a loan as A Limited in a bank, reappear as B Limited in another bank, and C Limited in another bank. This is why we are unveiling the real people behind these companies -their promoters and directors. We believe that this will put other financial institutions on notice to ensure that they don’t deal with those characters.

“As a matter of fact, some of these cases are already in EFCC, Economic and Financial Crime Commission, and some in courts.

“We didn’t blacklist these companies just because they were unable to pay, no. We all understand that sometimes, you can have difficulties and you may make genuine efforts to pay but unable to pay. This is not the category of people we have blacklisted. The people we are talking about are people who have deliberately defaulted. They are customers of shady character and questionable integrity. Customers who diverted loans meant for the acquisition of plant and machinery to ventures outside the agreement signed with the Bank. Some of these customers provided cloned title documents, thus committing outright frauds.

“In addition to unveiling these companies, we have taken the additional step of naming their directors and shareholders, such that other lending institutions and credit bureaus are sufficiently put on notice,”