The lives of some Nigerian millionaires and billionaires will resonate as one dismal lie from one end to the other, by the time Access Bank Plc completes its revenue recovery drive.
While this sad reality extends beyond the reaches of Access Bank, the pathetic case of Muyiwa Bakare and some other bank debtors has become hot gossip across the cubicles and halls of first-generation banks and Nigeria’s high society circuits.
According to information, Bakare, who is the son of a former billionaire auto magnate, Chief S. O Bakare, founder of Oluwalogbon Motors, and also the former MD of the moribund Metropolitan bank, is currently indebted to Access Bank in several million and this has incited the dissatisfaction of the bank’s management led by meticulous banking Czar, Herbert Wigwe.
The latter has reportedly embarked on a debt recovery scheme as part of his drive to recover outstanding debts from the bank’s chronic debtors.
It is interesting to know that Bakare is simply one of many debtors of Access Bank whose outrageous debts may put the bank in a precarious financial situation if the bank’s management does not recover loans owed by them by year’s end.
At the backdrop of Access Bank’s debt recovery drive, pundits note that Skye Bank may need to initiate a similar scheme to recover debts owed it by debtors such as Festus Fadeyi, Pan Ocean Corporation boss, who allegedly owes the bank N196 billion.
Besides Access Bank and Skye Bank, several other new generation banks are doing battle to recover outrageous debts owed them by career debtors.
The latter despite their disgraceful insolvency and indebtedness in billions, continually parade themselves as Lagos big boys and sophisticated members of Nigeria’s high society.
In reality, they are chronic debtors and poor managers of wealth who have gone bankrupt, argued a highly placed source in one of the banks affected by their debts.
Interestingly, however, you couldn’t have forgotten so soon the Bakare’s expensive 50th birthday shindig for his wife recently.
The party was allegedly borne of his desperation to save face and make the world believe that even though Access Bank aggressively seeks to recover debts owed it by him, he is still rock solid.
Further findings substantiated the fact that for Muyiwa, the birthday celebration goes beyond just celebrating his wife; it presented a platform and opportunity to keep up appearances.
An alumnus of California State University in Northridge California, Warwick Business School and Lagos Business School, not even his education and exposure and privileged background could save his bank from going under then. And so went his cash cow too.
Several friends gave up on him and business associates deserted him but he was blessed to still have the likes of Saraki and Access Bank MD, Herbert Wigwe, in his corner.
The CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele, contended that the intervention became inevitable in view of the bank’s liquidity and non-performing loan ratios which had been below and above the required thresholds respectively for a while.