A few third-party agents employed by foreign missions have been charged by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) with evading transaction restrictions through the use of dollar invoices.
In an interview with Politics Today on Channel TV, Wilson Uwujaren, the commission’s director of public affairs, made this claim.
Foreign missions located in Nigeria were instructed to use the naira in their financial operations and were prohibited from transacting in foreign currencies by the EFCC, which read the riot book to them on Saturday.
In an interview with Channels on Monday, Uwujaren asserted that the naira is the sole legal tender in Nigeria and stated that the Foreign Affairs Ministry has been notified of this development by the commission.
“The Naira is the only legal tender in Nigeria,” he stated, referring to Section 20 Subsection 1 of the EFCC Act. This means that only Naira is accepted for payment anywhere in the nation.
“We discovered instances where third parties doing work for missions bill in dollars, so evading that restriction. Some of them even go so far as to calculate the value of the naira in exchange throughout their transactions.
We find this to be concerning. Thus, we must present this to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In order to alert the foreign mission to this observation and advise them to make sure that their operations do not violate our laws, it is the government’s duty to regulate protocol and communication channels.
