Business
NACCIMA Lauds CBN Over Additional IMTO Licences
The Leadership of the Ni
gerian Association of Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture (NACCIMA), has lauded the nation’s apex bank, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) over its decision and policy to license additional International Money Transfer Operators (IMTOs) to the existing ones.
A statement issued in Lagos on Monday and signed by the NACCIMA National President, Chief Bassey Edem, said the move by the CBN is to liberalise the foreign Exchange Market, ensure liquidity and make foreign exchange easily available to members of the Association and other end users.
Edem stressed that the CBNs decision was a step in the right direction in ensuring that remittances from Nigerians in the diaspora remain a viable source of foreign exchange for the nation’s economy.
He said that the CBN’s policy will put price control and determination in a few hands and create an enabling environment for share practices within the forex parallel market, adding that beneficiaries of foreign currency proceeds be allowed to determine at what rate to sell the currency and when to sell their proceeds.
He added that the situation will create multiple supplier/sellers to meet the existing demand in the parallel market and relieve the pressure on the inter-bank window.
The NACCIMA chairman in the statement further explained that the policy will constitute a disincentive to the inflow beneficiaries of the foreign currency thereby making them to consider other alternative sources that could be counterproductive and divert the inflows to unproductive ventures.
He said that the Chambers would remain committed to providing enabling environment for free enterprise and competitive market to promote mobility of labour , products and capital through uniformly applied regulatory systems.
He urged CBN management to reconsider its earlier principle that operators be required to remit foreign currency to their respective agent banks in the country for disbursement in naira to the beneficiaries while the foreign currency proceeds are to be sold to Bureau De Change Operators for onward retail to end users.
Meanwhile, the management of the nation’s apex bank has recently licensed 11 additional IMTOs to ease the challenges faced by the organized private sector in accessing foreign exchange in the forex market.
Philip Okparaji