Access Holdings Fined N557 Million By CBN Over Alleged FX Breaches And ‘Fictitious’ Forwards

Access Holdings Fined N557 Million By CBN

OpenLife News has gathered that Access Holdings Plc’s banking unit paid N557 million in twelve (12) different Central Bank of Nigeria penalties in the first half of 2026.
Most of the fines related to foreign-exchange breaches, including filing net open position returns that contained “fictitious forward transactions”, according to  the group’s unaudited H1 2026 financial statements.
The total is 29% more than the N432 million Access Bank disclosed for the first half of 2025. The fines equal about 0.2% of the group’s H1 profit after tax of N266.72 billion.

What the CBN Found
Ten of the 12 penalties came from two CBN foreign-exchange examinations, covering April 2023 to March 2024 and April 2024 to March 2025.
Together they made up N369 million, or 66% of the total. The largest single fine, N167.96 million, was for late remittance of recovered funds under a CBN intervention facility granted to Max Air.

The Fictitious Forward Transactions
The most serious findings concern regulatory reporting, not customer service. The CBN fined the bank N25 million for booking forward FX purchases and sales without eligible underlying transactions.
It then imposed two N50 million fines because those same deals appeared in its foreign currency trading position (FCTP) and net open position (NOP) returns. The filing describes the NOP forwards as “fictitious”.
The net open position is the main limit the CBN uses to cap a bank’s currency risk. Returns that include deals with no underlying trade can make a bank’s dollar position look smaller or more hedged than it really is.
Both breaches were cited under BOFIA 2020. Together, the three forward-related penalties and the late submission of the FX general ledger total N153 million, or 27% of the half-year fines, on MoneyCentral calculations.

Max Air and the Intervention Funds
The N167.96 million fine relates to the Real Sector Support Facility funded from the Differentiated Cash Reserve Requirement (RSSF-DCRR).
Under this CBN scheme, banks lend central bank money to the real sector and must pass loan recoveries back to the regulator.
Max Air is a Kano-based carrier with a troubled safety record. It suspended domestic flights for three months from January 31, 2025, after a nose-gear collapse in Kano, and was cleared to resume on March 17, 2025, according to the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority.
All the H1 2026 fines were imposed between February and June 2026 for conduct dating back as far as April 2023.
This suggests the CBN is still working through its backlog of examinations, so more penalties for earlier periods could follow.