The Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ola Olukoyede, has said 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, Jabi, 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 have to grow. We call them growing concerns. 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 can’t work, they can’t grow, they can’t operate, they can’t 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.
“Don’t be surprised that there are businesses set up to destroy our economy as well. Those ones we are going to attack.
“We are going to enforce the law against them very strictly, but the ones that probably become accessories in one way or the other, money got laundered through the account, we should be able to separate proceeds of crime from legitimate funds and deal with it,” he said.
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 Director- General of SMEDAN, 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.
The said 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 said.
Continuing, he stressed that, “we want to embrace a partnership that is already in existence in the sense that if these 40 million small businesses that are contributing to our GDP trust that they can do business in Nigeria and that the EFCC is not an enemy but a partner in economic growth, it will help to instil a lot of business confidence.
“We want them to see EFCC as a partner for economic growth and a partner for development,” he said.
