We Never Sacked 650 Workers—Sterling Bank

By Dipo Olowookere

One of the lenders in Nigeria, Sterling Bank, has debunked reports making the round since yesterday that it sacked about 650 of its workers.

Sterling Bank, in a statement to Business Post on Friday, emphasised that the said disengaged workers were never their employees.

“These 650 workers, in press reports, are not staff of Sterling Bank, but were assigned to the bank by our service providers.

“The Service Level Agreement (SLA) with the parent companies allow them to reassign their staff to any other institution they (service providers) deem fit,” a part of the statement explained.

Shedding more light on the issue, the bank said “In the course of its operations, our bank engages the services of third party service providers, who assign their staff to Sterling Bank to carry out specific tasks” on the behalf of the service providers.

However, Sterling Bank appealed to the media to endeavour to “confirm any stories relating to the bank with our corporate communications team,” stressing it is always available by email and through social media channels for verification of news stories.

Meanwhile, Sterling Bank says despite the prevailing economic climate, it continues to manage a business, which cares about its people, with an outstanding record of building and growing mutually-beneficial relationship with members of its staff.

The lender said it would continue to “build capacity for our people through excellent training and developmental programmes such as the Sterling Graduate Associate and the Sterling Management Associate programmes targeted at identifying, grooming and developing young talents for leadership positions in the bank.”