Magu probe: Shocking details of how FCMB credited Prophet Omale’s church account with N573 million in error

As the probe of Ibrahim Magu intensifies, the Managing Director of First City Monument Bank (FCMB), Adam Nuru has testified that a sum of N573 million was erroneously posted into the church account of Prophet Emmanuel Omale.

Omale, the founder of Divine Hand of God Prophetic Ministries had earlier been accused of being used by the suspended Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ibrahim Magu of laundering funds abroad.

The President panel has also alleged that the embattled EFCC Chairman purchased a property in Dubai, using him as a frontier, an allegation, he denied.

Former Justice of the Court of Appeal, Ayo Salami chairs a panel that has been investigating Magu over alleged corrupt enrichment.

Nuru’s testimony before the panel on Thursday explained that, “the bank just discovered the mistake upon invitation by the committee — four years after the money was posted.

“On January 16, 2016, we made a return to NFIU which indicated that there was a transaction of an inflow of well over N573million. (N573,228,40),” the bank MD said.

“This return was said to be in favour of Divine Hand of God Prophetic Ministries Account No 1486743019.

“After that report, we conducted an investigation and discovered that the lodgement which we reported to NFIU was an error.

FCMB boss said it was a computer application error, saying that the bank was earlier using pinnacle 7 application which was later migrated to the upgraded pinnacle 10.

“Usually, when the bank intends to migrate from one application to another, we utilize weekends to carry out the exercise. The migration involves moving all the balances of customers from the previous application to the new application. The account of the Divine Hand Ministries was moved during that migration.

“It was that balance of N573million that was wrongly posted as an inflow into Divine Hand Ministries as reported to NFIU. This error was not peculiar to Divine Hand of God Prophetic Ministries alone but was also ascribed to 27 other accounts.”