Despite the EFCC’s crackdown, the naira falls to N680 per dollar on the black market.

Ibekimi Oriamaja reports

Yesterday, the naira lost ground to the dollar on the secondary foreign exchange (forex) market.

Operators of bureaux de change (BDCs), often known as “abokis,” said that the street market exchange rate for the local currency was N680 per dollar after a N15 or 2.3% depreciation.

The street market’s closing rate for the naira last week was N665 to $1.

The street vendors set the price of the dollar at N665 for purchase and N680 for sale, leaving them with a N15 profit margin.

The FX market, according to them, is once again scarce.

There is no money and there is a strong demand. A client will claim that he saw the dollar advertised online for N670 or N675 if you ask him to sell it to you for N650. We also need to acquire something. To turn a profit, we are buying and selling, a dealer at the Ikeja market told TheCable.

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According to FMDQ OTC Securities Exchange, a platform that regulates foreign exchange trading in Nigeria, the naira strengthened by 0.52 percent to close at N428.75 to the dollar yesterday on the official market.

Since the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) raided a BDC hub in Abuja last week, the foreign currency market has appreciated.

In order to either hoard or smuggle money out of Nigeria, the anti-graft agency claimed that some BDC owners were scooping up foreign currencies, particularly the dollar.

The EFCC promised to crack down on people and organizations hoarding foreign currency in important commercial centers including Kano, Lagos, Port Harcourt, Enugu, and Calabar in order to stop the rising incidence of FX speculation.

The naira is currently 200 percent overvalued, according to Bismarck Rewane, chief executive officer of Financial Derivatives Company.

He anticipated that the official rate will decrease the next month.