KARACHI, March 13: NIB Bank President Khawaja Iqbal Hassan has said that his bank regrets the error that had crept up in the reporting of consolidated financial figures on Feb 27, relating to the year ended on Dec 31, 2007, but said there was no wrongdoing.

Talking to Dawn on Thursday, the bank president said that due to shortage of time in meeting the deadline for submission of accounts, errors occurred due to oversight as the bank had to consolidate accounts of more than a dozen merged companies. In a detailed explanation, the bank listed accounting entries that aggregated first to a profit of Rs481 million and then to a loss of Rs111 million on review, when all adjustments were incorporated.

The letter, submitted to the regulators in explanation of the errors, contains basically technical details, but for a layman, it could be said that income received by the bank under certain heads had been erroneously booked twice, which resulted in a profit of Rs480 million instead of a loss of Rs111 million.

Mr Iqbal Hassan said that the bank had either the option to sit back after submission of the first accounts on Feb 27 and take the new entries next year to show them as ‘prior year’s adjustment’. “But in the interest of good corporate governance, we decided to provide the correct figures this year on March 7,” says the NIB Bank president.

That the troupe of bank’s accountants, the internal and external auditors were unable to detect the error prior to the announcement of first consolidated figures, was regrettable, Mr Hassan said, but wished to assure the depositors and shareholders that the stand-alone figures were the same in both despatches; that the bank was in sound financial health and if there had been some loss in stock value, it would be recouped soon.