The Presidential Committee on Audit of Recovered Assets (PCARA) has discovered in their ongoing investigation that a sum of N573,228,40 was paid into a church account in aiding the suspended acting Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ibrahim Magu to launder funds abroad.

In a response, Adam Nuru, Managing Director of First City Monument Bank (FCMB) who testified before the committee on Thursday, August 6, affirmed that the money paid into the church’s account four years ago was an act of error.

The leader of the said church, Divine Hand of God Prophetic Ministries, according to the bank is Prophet Emmanuel Omale.

“On January 16, 2016, we made a return to NFIU which indicated that there was a transaction of an inflow of well over N573million. (N573,228,40).

“This return was said to be in favour of Divine Hand of God Prophetic Ministries Account No. 1486743019.

“After that report, we conducted an investigation and discovered that the lodgement which we reported to NFIU was an error,” said the bank MD.

Nuru added that the error was as a result of an upgrade of the bank’s application platform to a much higher version adding that the transaction was erroneously posted as an inflow.

However, PCARA claimed that the laundered funds was used to purchase a property in Dubai.

“The error was as a result of the fact that we were using a bank application called Pinnacle-7. However, we migrated from that application to a newer version called Pinnacle-10.

“Usually, when the bank intends to migrate from one application to another, we utilize weekends to carry out the exercise. The migration involves moving all the balances of customers from the previous application to the new application. The account of the Divine Hand Ministries was moved during that migration.

“It was that balance of N573million that was wrongly posted as an inflow into Divine Hand Ministries as reported to NFIU. This error was not peculiar to Divine Hand of God Prophetic Ministries alone but was also ascribed to 27 other accounts,” he added.

Investigations of the embattled acting EFCC Chairman is the still ongoing as more revelations continue to emerge which has led to his suspension by the Presidency in July.