AMCON recovers N134bn loans in 2016

By Emeka Anaeto & Babajide Komolafe

Asset Management  Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON) yesterday said that it recovered N134 billion loans in the 2016 financial year.

Managing Director/Chief Executive, AMCON, Mr. Ahmed Kuru disclosed this while briefing the press on the performance of the company in the 2016 financial year.

He said: “In 2016, our total recovery was N134 billion. Not all of them are cash. N86.9 billion came from cash collection and some debtors that felt that they could settle some outstanding obligation through forfeiture of their assets. So, assets forfeiture amounted to about N30.4 billion, while N8 billion came from sale of properties.”

Kuro said that in spite of the economic challenges, AMCON was able to improve on its performance by reducing its group losses for the year by N57 billion to N352 billion at end of December 2016 from N295 billion at end of December 2015.

He said: “For AMCON stand-alone financial statement,  we did a lot of improvement from last year. Last year we closed at N310 billion losses, this year we were able to manage it down to N251 billion losses. We had a very appreciable improvement in terms of main operation alone.

“But we had the burden of subsidiaries that we had to add to our own figures. The position from last year doing a comparison of our performance for last year, we went a little bit back. For 2016, we closed at N315 billion for the year while in 2015 it was N295 billion. So while on the part of AMCON there was an appreciable improvement in terms of our numbers, the losses came down drastically, by almost about N59 billion but for the group numbers.

He also disclosed that during the 2016 financial year, banks contributed N136 billion into the AMCON sinking fund, adding that the banks have so far contributed N931 billion into the sinking fund since inception.

He said: “The projection was that the banks were going to grow at 20 per cent, which never came to pass. So, the contribution that we expected from the sinking fund was not up to what we had budgeted. In 2016, we had envisaged that the banks would have contributed about N288 billion, but they actually contributed only N136 billion. So, that was enough for us to pay down the principal. What we did was just to service the interest of our loan from the CBN. We pray that the contribution to the sinking fund would improve and then our losses would begin to go down.”

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