First Bank Moves to Recover ₦40 Billion Stolen by Employee.
First Bank of Nigeria has initiated legal proceedings to recover substantial funds allegedly embezzled by an employee.
The bank, with a market capitalization of ₦829 billion, reported the incident to the Nigerian Police Force on March 25, 2024, and obtained multiple court orders to freeze accounts linked to the stolen funds.
FirstBank Pan-African Graduate Trainee Programme (Nigeria, DRC, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea)
According to Tech Cabal, the employee at the center of the scandal, Tijani Muiz Adeyinka, was a manager on the electronic products team at First Bank’s head office in Iganmu, Lagos.
Adeyinka, now a fugitive, allegedly diverted around ₦40 billion (approximately $29 million) over two years. He reportedly used his position to misappropriate funds by processing customer reversal requests to a merchant account under his control. The scheme went undetected due to his authority to finalize transactions without additional approvals.
The fraud was discovered when a customer complaint led to an internal review by the bank’s control unit, uncovering numerous suspicious transactions. First Bank promptly alerted the police and pursued legal measures to mitigate the financial damage.
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First Bank secured three court orders between April 4 and April 8, 2024, to freeze hundreds of accounts suspected of receiving the diverted funds. The affected accounts include 98 classified as first beneficiaries, one of which belongs to Adeyinka’s wife, and numerous second-tier accounts.
Court documents reveal that Adeyinka transferred funds to his wife’s account at Zenith Bank, which subsequently dispersed the money across 34 additional accounts. These accounts further funneled the funds to 1,190 other accounts, creating a complex web of transactions designed to obfuscate the origin of the stolen money.
“We are working closely with law enforcement agencies to unravel the circumstances surrounding this fraud and apprehend all culprits involved,” First Bank stated in a letter to the Lagos State Commissioner of Police on May 10, 2024.
