The last known position Alex Otti held was serving as the Managing Director of the defunct Diamond Bank.
Diamond Bank was envisioned by Dr. Pascal Dozie as a pan Igbo Bank like the ACB of old. Igbos, being entrepreneurs and business persons, the need for a supportive financial institution that will aid their entrepreneurial activities can not be over emphasized.
So, for many years, Nda Pascal worked tirelessly to build a robust financial institution that will help achieve this goal. So when they hired Alex, he shared this vision with him, and he pledged to carry on the vision.
A peep into the books of the bank after its collapse showed that Diamond Bank failed long before its final collapse. No bank, no business collapses all at once.
Before such collapse, the foundations of that collapse must have been laid by its managers either intentionally or by error of judgment.
In the case of Diamond Bank, both were the case. Reports showed that Diamond Bank against the recommendation of the CBN was involved in very risky lending practices to certain sectors in the region of above 50% as against the recommended 20% or even lower.
For man who claimed to be a first-class wizkid, those lending decisions made by Alex and his team, which eventually led to the collapse of the Bank clearly shows Alex as a very poor business manager and economic forecaster. Alex is always blinded by ambition even if he crashed the entire system to achieve his ill motivated ambitions.
Insider information is rife to the effect that many executives offered advice against the decisions Alex was authorizing as MD of Diamond Bank and were ignored.
This is one of the major shortcomings of Alex Otti. He has a ‘Mr Know it All” attitude that is why many of his close associates always abandon him after every political outing. Where are those who chaperoned him in 2015 when he landed on Abia’s political landscape as a messiah.
The reports by auditors showed that Alex was involved in several sharp practices, laying landmines that aided the collapse of Diamond Bank, one of the reasons he resigned before his term. Alex knew that Diamond Bank would collapse eventually.
The impact of that bank’s collapse on Igbo businesses was monumental. One of the victims of that collapse is Geometric Power. Diamond Bank was one of the major sponsors of Geometric Power envisioned to provide the electricity backbone for Aba and eventually the entire eastern region, making it the industrial and economic hub of West Africa.
Alex is anti development. That is why when Abia state government like many other states was almost closing financial deals to inject $200 million for massive infrastructural development, Alex personally wrote a petition against that and made sure he used his conatcts to frustrate that deal. This denied Abia 500 km of world-class roads.
Fortunately, after a technical representation of the project to AfDB, a new approval was given, and the project, which will soon commence, will see Abia increase its infrastructure stock with an additional 500 KM of world class roads.
Alex is a corporate mafia, yet that hasn’t been reflected in Abia. Rather, he has only used that position to further selfish and personal ambitions.
Dr Pascal can never forget Alex in a hurray so is the thousands of former staff of Diamond Bank mostly Igbos who lost their jobs owing to the seed of collapse sown by Alex before he ran off from the Bank as MD.
Tags: 2023 General Election, Abia Government, Abia Politics, Alex Otti