BY Aderemi Ojekunle
abokiFX, a web platform that reports movements in the foreign exchange market, has suspended operations as the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) placed its owners on investigations.
The platform said this in a notice posted on its website on Friday.
At the end of the monetary policy committee (MPC) meeting on Friday, Godwin Emefiele, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), confirmed the investigation of Oniwinde Adedotun, the founder of abokiFX.
On Thursday, TheCable had reported that Adedotun and abokiFX Limited are currently under investigation for “illegal foreign exchange transactions”.
Speaking on the allegations, Emefiele claimed that Oniwinde used his website for forex manipulations and speculations by purchasing forex to make a profit — describing him as an illegal forex trader.
But in a statement on Friday evening, abokiFX distanced itself from the allegations, saying the platform is solely for parallel rate information and not trading.
“abokifx has taken the decision, today, 17th of September 2021, to temporarily suspend rate updates on all our platforms until we get better clarity of the situation,” the statement reads.
“Final rates have been posted this evening, but the abokiFX news section and the Crypto rates section will still be active.
“abokiFX was established in 2014 as a research and information service company, to conduct market research and gather data on the parallel market rates. We also wanted to provide some transparency around the parallel market with the available information technology.
“abokiFX purely provided benchmark parallel rate information which helps guide our users in almost 200 countries across the world.
“abokiFX does NOT TRADe FX, which we have always maintained in our emails and social media platforms.”
The platform said it has not received any official communication from any government agencies and its accounts intact.
“All allegations against our director are yet to be confirmed but we at abokiFX DO NOT trade FX neither do we manipulate parallel market rates”, the statement adds.
“Outside the media allegation, we have not received any communication from any government body and our accounts are not closed as stipulated in the media.
“abokiFX is fully functional BUT we will not be publishing any form of rates on our platforms for now.
“We sincerely hope this suspension will lead to the Naira appreciation from next week.
“With our decision to temporarily suspend online rate publication, we are aware that there will be limited visibility of parallel rates information which will impact decision making for many.”
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