By Pascal Oparada
The fight between Innoson Motors and Guarantee Trust Bank (GTB) is getting messier as the bank continues to assail the vehicle manufacturing company on social media because of a tweet on Friday, June 8, 2018, from Innoson’s twitter handle which said the Supreme Court had awarded Innoson N14 billion against GTBank. The bank has since refuted the claim.
In a release sent to its customers, GTBank refuted the statement by Innoson calling it ‘malicious and mischievous.’ The bank asked its customers to disregard the statement from Innoson.
“The attention of Guaranty Trust Bank Plc (“the Bank”) has been drawn to false, mischievous and malicious statements circulating in the news and social media in respect of a purported directive by the Supreme Court of Nigeria to the Bank to make payments to one of its debtor Customers.
The Bank’s Customers and the General Public are hereby kindly urged to disregard these false statements as nothing could be further from the truth. There was no directive or Order issued by the Supreme Court of Nigeria to the Bank to make any payment to any of its debtor Customers.
The Bank as a highly responsible corporate citizen will in accordance with its culture and tradition refrain from making comments about on-going litigation matters and will continue to focus on using legal means to recover its bad debts. It must be emphasized that the Bank remains undeterred in its recovery drive against recalcitrant debtors.
We again reiterate that there is no iota of truth in the falsehood being peddled by desperate and mischievous elements and the General Public should disregard same in its entirety,” the statement reads.
Innoson has since apologized.
In the apology, Innoson said the caption was a slight distortion of the information.
“When the information came to our notice, we had to correct the error made by the staff of the agency managing our accounts. We apologize for the misleading information,” Innoson said via its Twitter handle.
Since the apology, GTBank, through paid bloggers and social media influencers has created a hashtag, #Innosonlied, to troll Innoson on social media.
The hashtag has remained number one on Twitter Trends on Wednesday.
Innoson Motors has engaged the bank in a bitter legal battle over claims of excess charges by the bank against it. This has led to a raid by operatives of Economic and Financial Commission (EFCC) in the premises of Innoson Chairman, Innocent Chukwuma in which he was arrested on alleged forgery. He was released after a public outrage.
