As more customers of banks and other business people overcome the earlier difficulties in obtaining forex for their transactions, and in a bid to sustain the tempo of foreign exchange supply to the interbank FOREX market and ensure liquidity, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) on Thursday, March 9, 2017, offered the sum of $100,000,000 as wholesale interventions, just as it sold about $70,000,000 to meet requests for Business/Personal Travel Allowances.
Disclosing this to newsmen yesterday, the CBN Acting Director, Corporate Communications, Isaac Okorafor, said the Bank remained resolute in ensuring that it supplies enough forex to genuine customers of Deposit Money Banks and increase liquidity in the market.
According to him, the uniqueness of the Wholesale Forwards was that banks are allowed to use their winnings from auctions to fund matured obligations to meet Letters of Credit remittances, extinguish bills for collection and other forex demands.
With this development, importers who had hitherto been using bills for collection will now experience relief instead of having to patronize other more expensive sources.
It will be recalled that the CBN only on Tuesday, March 7, 2017 injected another sum of $100m into the interbank foreign exchange market in its resolve to ease the challenge of access to foreign exchange by genuine customers.
Thursday’s injection by the CBN takes the amount so far offered in the interbank forex market within the past few weeks to over $1.2 billion for both wholesale and retail interventions.
