The consortium of 13 banks involved in Etisalat Nigeria’s $1.2 billion loan wants the Federal Government, through the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), to investigate what the company did with the loan.

A management source yesterday, alleged that the loans were siphoned and needed to be investigated by the EFCC, noting, there was no proof of what the company did with the loan.

He said that the affected banks had rolled out a lot of viable options to Etisalat for the loan to be restructured, but was rejected by the company. The source according to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) said that the banks were not into telecommunications and had no intention of running Etisalat.

“All we want is to recover the loans; we cannot write off the loans as being demanded by Etisalat, because the company is viable,” the source stated. The source said that Etisalat wanted the banks to write off the loan as non-performing, which was rejected because the company was doing well.

According to the source, the company wants injection of new capital, and this has been suggested to the majority shareholder. The source said the government should investigate the matter with all seriousness, to dig out the truth.