Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, (EFCC) Ola Olukoyede, has declared that the era of freezing on individual and company accounts is over.

Olukoyede made the declaration on Monday, during a chat with the Director-General, Small and Medium Enterprise Development Agency of Nigeria, (SMEDAN) Charles Odii in Abuja.

The EFCC boss told Odii, who paid him a courtesy visit, said the Commission will separate proceeds of crime from legitimate funds to allow businesses to grow in Nigeria.

“The era of PND on peoples’ or companies’ accounts indiscriminately is over. If you trace proceeds of crime to any account, the best thing for you to do is to separate it from legitimate funds. Businesses have to grow. We call them growing concerns. We have to allow them to grow,” Olukoyede said.

Olukoyede stated that these are people having many people in their employment and if PND is placed on their accounts, they will not be able to work, grow, operate, pay salary and employees will be sacked.

He, however, warned that the EFCC would deploy the full wrath of the law on any business that was set up to destroy the economy.

The SMEDAN DG revealed that the country has lost over three million businesses to insecurity, fraud, global competitiveness and lack of ease of doing business.

He explained that his team was at the Commission to create trust and enhance the existing partnership with the EFCC.

“We are here for two things: the first one is trust, there are 40 million businesses that we represent as their vanguard. We are like their advocates and many of them want to know if they can trust the new EFCC.

“They want to know if the EFCC is not going to contribute to the demise of small businesses.”

He said that want to embrace a partnership that is already in existence in the sense that if these 40 million small businesses trust that they can do business in Nigeria and that the EFCC is not an enemy but a partner in economic growth it will help to instill a lot of business confidence.

He added that the idea is to see EFCC as a partner for economic growth and a partner for development.