The Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria (FRCN) has failed to sanction or regulate companies found to be violating International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) despite pledging to FIJ in August 2023 that it would be more proactive in doing what it was set up to do.

FIJ spent months reviewing court documents and annual reports companies, including United Bank for Africa (UBA), Access Bank, Guinness Nigeria PLC, MRS and Total Energies, submitted to the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NGX).

We found and reported how the companies were underreporting their claims and litigation portion of their annual reports and deceiving investors in the process.

With this, we wrote to FRC and took the letter to their offices on August 9. There, they told us they were aware Nigerian companies were not maintaining the standards set by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB).

READ MORE: Corporate ‘Delulu’: Companies Hide Lawsuits From Investors, Violate IFRS — And Regulators Turn Blind Eye

A member of the FRC’s staff said to FIJ: “Yes! In our meetings, we ask them to even make provisions for cases they’ve lost, regardless of whether they are appealing. In other western jurisdictions, you see the disclosures running into pages, but here in Nigeria, they are always afraid that when they make the disclosure, the claimant can go to court and say the company is already accepting guilt, thereby urging the judge to ask them to pay the claim.

“It is a top-burner agenda in FRCN and other agencies during inspection meetings, so we are on top of it and trying to come up with a rule for how such instances should be treated in financial statements.”

When FIJ asked him if the council would probe previous infractions, he said, “The council will come up with a provision on that, for whether to treat prospective or retrospective cases.”

FIJ has called and texted on several occasions since then, but the FRC has refused to respond.

Meanwhile, four days after FIJ’s publication, UBA, one of the indicted companies, published a press release titled ‘UBA commits to global reporting standards, releases 2022 Annual Sustainability Report‘.

This press release was made to appear as though the company was announcing a sustainability report, but FIJ found that on the UBA website, this report was published on June 22, 2023, two months before that press release.