A human rights group, Civil Liberties Organisation, on Monday, alleged that bureaux de change operators in the country have become money launderers for politicians.
The group particularly decried the situation whereby bureaux de change operators source dollars from the Central Bank of Nigeria at the rate of N190 per dollar and sell it at N270 per dollar to Nigerians.
The President of the CLO, Igho Akeregha, stated this during a news conference in Lagos on Monday.
Describing most bureaux de change operators as blood-sucking merchants and heartless capitalists, Akeregha expressed the fear that if nothing was done to urgently check their excesses, the nation would suffer from an impending economic disaster.
The group expressed concerns that bureaux de change operators were weekly increasing in number, noting that they had increased from an initial number of 74 to 2,800 with hundreds of applicants still waiting to be licenced by the CBN.
It called on the government to undertake an urgent restructuring of bureau de change operations in the country so as to bring it in line with international best practices.
In a statement jointly signed by Akeregha and the group’s strategist, Chijioke Odom, the CLO said, “We believe that the BDCs were designed and redesigned to facilitate ease of corruption in Nigeria, especially as a potential vehicle for laundering the proceeds of corrupt funds into foreign currencies.
“This has become hugely justified given the easier with which corrupt public officers exchange ill-gotten wealth stolen from our collective patrimony into dollars.
“The vehicle for bribery in Nigeria has since changed from naira to the US dollars, as it became easy and handier to give and accept bribe in dollars rather than in naira.
“The immediate consequence of this is that it encourages corrupt officers to be more daring and this has increased the demand for the US dollars.
“As corrupt officers never sweated to make money, they never found it difficult to pay whatever price the BDCs placed on their dollar caches.”
The CLO said the situation demanded urgent attention, especially as Nigeria’s dollar-earning power was waning in view of the continuous fall in crude oil price.
It demanded that the Federal Government and the CBN should take a firm stand against the excesses of the bureaux de change operators in order to protect the interest of the masses.
It said that in line with international best practices, bureaux de change operators should be made to source foreign currencies from autonomous sources rather than the CBN.
“With the way the BDCs operate, they have become a huge scam and an avenue for truncating the dream and destiny of this nation,” the CLO said.
