Name And Shame Them: Banks Put Up Chronic Debtors’ Property For Sale

After releasing list of the names of their debtors and the amounts they owe, Banks in the country have compiled for sale the lists of houses, hotels, filling stations, schools, among other property used as collateral by debtors in a bid to recover their capital.

The banks, in a name and shame manner, had earlier in the week published the lists of chronic debtors who were unable to meet up with the July 31 deadline given by the Central Bank of Nigeria to repay their loans.

So far, 17 banks had published the names of their delinquent debtors and of the N175.61bn being owed the banks, First Bank has N43.72bn non-performing loans; Unity Bank, 45.52bn; Access Bank, N3.4bn; Diamond Bank, N47.17bn; First City Monument Bank, N17.1bn; Ecobank, N5.4bn; UBA, N9.3bn; and Wema Bank, N1.26bn.

While the Assets Management Company of Nigeria, Standard Chartered Bank, Keystone Bank and others are waiting to publish their lists of debtors next week, the total number of debtors so far released by the banks, after removing some names due to litigation and last-minute renegotiation, is 606.

However, investigations by Saturday PUNCH revealed that apart from publishing the debtors’ names, some of the banks had concluded plans to sell real estate assets used as collateral by debtors and had already engaged the services of estate firms/agents to dispose them.