The management of Abokifx, an online platform that publishes black market rates in Nigeria, has announced the website will suspend publishing rates.
This is coming after the CBN accused Abokifx of carrying out an “illegal activity that undermines the economy, said and that it was after Oniwinde Adedotun, the publisher of the platform.
The CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele, at the end of the Monetary Policy Committee meeting on Friday in Abuja, said Adedotun is using his platform for “illegal forex trading”.
He alleged that Adedotun lives in the UK and publishes arbitrary rates without contacting BDCs.
“He is a Nigerian, living in England, we will track him, Mr Oniwinde, we will track you.
“We cannot allow you to continue to kill our economy,” Emefiele said.
Responding to this, AbokiFX in a statement on Friday distanced itself from the allegations, saying the platform is solely for parallel rate information and not trading.
The statement reads: “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.
“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.”
In addition, the platform noted that it has not received any official communication from any government agencies and its accounts are still active.
“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.Advertisement
“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.”
