Nigeria on Friday announced it would shut down Aboki FX.com, a website that provides information on currency exchange, declaring that the site was engaged in illegal and criminal activities.
Giving the order in Abuja, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele also declared Mr Olusegun Oniwinde, owner of AbokiFX, wanted for being an illegal FX dealer.
Emefiele was speaking at the end of a two-day meeting of the Monetary Policy Committee meeting.
The Nigerian naira has come under undue pressure in about two months, losing about 10 percent of its value in the parallel market, also known as the “black market”, where it trades at about 550/$, according to some figures.
Despite this the naira has remained stable on the Importers and Exporter window, where it currently exchanges for about 411/$
Emefiele blamed this on the activities of Oniwinde’s AbokiFX through which he said Oniwinde manipulates the naira exchange rate and turns around to benefit from its through illegal trades.
“Mr Oniwinde started the AbokiFX operation in 2015 and has since milked the economy by taking position while manipulating the exchange rate,” an angry Emefiele said.
“Oniwinde lives in London while concocting criminal activities in our economy,” he said.
Giving further details the governor said: “Our preliminary findings show that the company continue to file the same cash account in the United Kingdom whereas he maintained about 25 accounts with 8 banks in Nigeria, milking the system and collecting cash through Automatic Teller machines in London.
“He then sells tens of millions in FX to company’s in Nigeria and we will go after them all.”
“I have given instructions to our experts to go after his website and let it be clear that we will go after him, because we can’t allow this to continue,” Emefiele said.
Citing the CBN act, section 2, the governor said that only the central bank can determine the value of the naira.