Emir Sanusi made this disclosure during his speech at the 15th Joint National Council on Development Planning meeting held in Kano yesterday. The Emir who noted that such businessmen go ahead to resell at a higher rate at the parallel market said: “We have created our own billionaires since 2015 from foreign exchange subsidy.”
In the speech titled: “Nigeria: The search for new growth model,” the emir noted that the businessmen buy the dollar at N197 and price their goods at N300.
“For instance, when the CBN was selling dollar at N197 and people were buying at N300, if I sit down in my garden and pick up my phone I would have enough people to call in the industry to get 10 million dollars at officials rate and sell at N300 and make a profit of over N1bn and if I do that four times in a year, for doing nothing I would have earned N4bn. “And people were telling us that this policy was to help the poor. We should not devalue because if we do the poor people would suffer.