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CBN building inferno halts foreign exchange trading

By BusinessNews Staff on March 28, 2014

Foreign exchange trading activities at the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Lagos office in Marina were temporarily suspended on Wednesday as a result of the fire that ravaged some sections of the building on Tuesday evening.

The CBN sells dollars running into billions of naira to authorised foreign exchange dealers at its twice-weekly regulated auction on Mondays and Wednesdays.

Although the bank sold about $395m to traders on Wednesday, it was not certain the transactions were completed due to the temporary suspension of trading activities occasioned by the fire incident.

The fire affected some sections of the building used for foreign exchange trading activities, it was learnt.

Several foreign exchange traders were seen hanging around the adjoining streets when our correspondent visited the CBN office in Marina on Wednesday.

The acting Governor, CBN, Dr. Sarah Alade, who visited the office to assess the situation, however, said the damage recorded was not serious.

According to her, issues relating to foreign exchange trading and other activities will be resolved on Thursday (today).

She said the CBN was waiting for the operatives of the Fire Service Department and engineers to declare the building fit before activities could resume there.

On when foreign exchange trading and other activities would resume at the building, Alade said, “By tomorrow (Thursday), we will solve that. We needed the fire people, we needthe engineers to come and declare it safe before we can move in; but by tomorrow (today), everything will be handled.”

She said the CBN could not immediately ascertain the cause of the fire, but that the fire service would reveal the cause of the inferno in due time.

While allaying fears that some vital documents belonging to the central bank might have been destroyed in the inferno, the acting governor said only “a few files” that had been backed up by the bank and some personal effects were ravaged by the fire.

She said, “Mostly personal effects and just a few files; very, very few files that are backed up anyway; so, in terms of documents, we have not really lost anything. There was no cash lost, and you will recall that the incident occurred when we had closed.

“It is mainly the banking hall where we do payment to people. The governor’s office was not affected at all. It is just the branch support office and one other office that were affected.”

Meanwhile, all the staff members in the departments affected by the fire have been relocated to the new CBN building besides the old building that was affected by the fire incident.

[Punch]

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