CBZ (Commercial Bank of Zimbabwe) stumbles – badly

26 01 2012

Last Friday I was in the bank and got the cash I needed without a problem. I saw the ART Farm accountant there and he was muttering about not being able to do transfers. Over the weekend it emerged that they had a liquidity problem so it was with a bit of concern on Monday that I went to draw wages. They grudgingly gave me the $4000 or so that I needed but most people were only getting $1000 and they only had smaller denomination notes; $20 and less. There was clearly a serious problem here.

In Friday’s Independent newspaper CBZ was reported as loaning $713 million last year, more than double the next bank, BancABC. I have also heard anecdotally of a farmer who got a $1m loan from CBZ – clearly impossible to pay back in Zimbabwe’s economic climate. Then yesterday Shelton told me that he’d seen in the press that the liquidity problem WAS due to too many loans being given out. Just who was in charge of that aspect? Is this a case of “loans for mates” of Gideon Gono who has significant influence there? I wouldn’t be surprised.


Actions

Information

2 responses

26 01 2012
Big Blister

That is scareeee! And I suppose your account is not guaranteed in any way – silly question.

26 01 2012
gonexc

Yup, silly question. My “personal banker” assured me today that the problem would be sorted out by next week and that it was due to the bank paying civil servants their salaries. She admitted that they’d over-committed themselves.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s




%d bloggers like this: