Augene Business Synergy, a document reorganisation company, has accused First Bank of refusing to pay a balance of N1.9 million for the services it provided to the bank in 2019 and 2020.

The firm told FIJ that it was contacted by First Bank for document reorganisation in 2018 on a contract-based arrangement.

“On document reorganisation, there are two waves to it. The first and second wave was in Imo State and Lagos State respectively. In December 2018, First Bank reached out to us for the re-organisation of their document. We were asked to begin the organisation in March 2019. Thereafter, we completed the job in June 2019. We submitted our close-out report in July,” the company said.

The firm said that First Bank was supposed to move the documents to its control centre in Enugu after the close-out report but refused to do so.

“For one whole year, the files were not moved out and they were tampered with. Some of our works have been scattered. They completely ignored all our complaints. They used the excuse of tampering to not pay us for our third milestone,” said the company.

The firm said the bank also refused to pay for the third milestone of the project’s wave 2 in 2020.

The company said it was owed N872,372 on wave 1 and N1,042,051 on wave 2.

When contacted, Deborah Olaniyi, First Bank’s project manager, told FIJ that she only served as a supervisor for the project, and that it was the bank’s responsibility to pay vendors.

“I was also hired as a vendor. As a vendor, I worked as a project manager,” she said.

FIJ made several calls to First Bank but they were not answered. An email was also sent to the bank, but they had not responded to it at press time.

FIJ had reported how JEF Integrated Synergy Ltd., a Lagos-based document management firm, accused First Bank of refusing to complete the payment for services it received in August 2019 and 2020.