CBN rejects Wale Bolorunduro’s nomination as LivingTrust chairman

The Central Bank of Nigeria
(CBN) has rejected the appointment of Dr Wale Bolorunduro into the board of the LivingTrust Mortgage Bank owing to his involvement in the crisis that rocked the bank’s board in April 2024.

LivingTrust is partly owned by the Osun State Government, and by arrangement, the state government is required to nominate non-executive directors to the board of the bank.

In April 2024, Governor Ademola Adeleke replaced Alhaji Adebayo Jimoh, the erstwhile chairman of the bank, with Bolorunduro as Chairman, a move many saw as economic disaster given Bolorunduro’s recent bad image, distasteful politics and controversy that engulfed his tenure as finance commissioner in the state.

According to the apex bank in a letter dated March 21, 2025, “the investigation carried out by the CBN Examiners as at May 31, 2024” found the former Osun finance commissioner culpable of tarnishing the image of the bank.

By this rejection, the CBN noted that the Osun State Government would be required to replace Bolorunduro “with a neutral person to ensure stability on the board.”

Bolorunduro served as Commissioner for Finance during Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola’s first term in office but was denied reappointment in the second term due to poor performance ascribed to him. His legacy includes burdening the state with unsustainable debt and securing costly commercial loans for extravagant school projects—many of which remain sparsely populated.

On November 1, 2013, the media was awash with reports of the Osun State House of Assembly lampooning Bolorunduro for implementing a poor budget. According to Hon. Kamil Oyedele, Chairman of the House Committee on Finance and Appropriation, Bolorunduro was advised to “move away from bogus budgets” that had no real impact on citizens’ welfare. Similar criticisms followed in subsequent year.