Coming first in any tournament of business and profitability requires boldness robust enough to topple the world. But when this boldness leads in the direction of greed and infamy, the trophies that follow being triumphant would eventually bury the winner under the weight of a bad reputation.
Guaranty Trust Bank (GT Bank) has come under serious attacks in recent times. The bank has gotten itself entangled with five different mega entities with a Lagos Federal High Court attempting to referee and settle things between the bank and the businesses. The only problem is that not one of these businesses is a small fry and the object of contention is a staggering N1 billion which has disappeared from the GT Bank domiciliary accounts of these companies.
For context, the entities whose trust GT Bank has reportedly lost are Chevron Nigeria, Shell Nigeria, Dangote Agro Sack Ltd, Nigeria Breweries, and the Jigawa State Local Government. The story is that four men deployed the resources of four companies to snatch varying but ginormous amounts of money from Chevron and the others. Certainly a duplicitous act steeped in fraud, the accused used various means to hack GT Bank data bases, thereby obtaining unauthorized access to the corporate accounts of these mega entities.
Although GT Bank is not the first prominent bank to have its server hacked, not even in 2023, it is certainly the one with the largest hole based on how much was stolen from the domiciliary accounts of Chevron, Dangote, and the others. The boldness of the accused boggles the healthy mind but the Court is yet to decide on what to do, and so it has pushed the next hearing of the case to April 25, 2023.
Whatever happens with the case, one thing is for sure: GT Bank has to give an explanation for the alleged porousness of its security system. Otherwise, it would be a guaranteed nest for fraud and fraudsters.