THE Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) has closed an
unspecified number of mobile money agent lines suspected to have been fuelling
exchange rate volatility.
A source within the central bank’s Financial Intelligence
Unit (FIU) told The Herald that the suspension of the mobile money agent lines
and accounts across all networks was meant to facilitate investigations into
potential illegal foreign currency activities.
The majority of financial transactions in Zimbabwe are
conducted on mobile platforms with EcoCash accounting for about 95 percent of
the volumes and the remainder by NetOne’s OneMoney.
Preliminary indications from the FIU show that transactions
valued at more than $75 million were being executed on the agent lines even
though the nature of their businesses did not support such huge money movement.
What heightened suspicion was the fact that the value of
transactions remained “excessively high” despite the country being under the
Covid-19 enforced lockdown for the past five weeks.
“That is the law of the FIU,” said a source within the
Reserve Bank who declined to be identified citing confidentiality. They want to
ensure that people or businesses with the agent lines are bona fide entities
and they have to prove the source of their funding. The FIU, which tracks
financial transactions in this country, wants mobile operators to enhance their
Know Your Customer framework after establishing that there is weak KYC
enforcement given the amount of suspicious transactions.
“It is not only EcoCash, but it is a market wide matter
whereby the FIU want operators to enforce KYC principles. Therefore they have
frozen suspected agent lines so that each matter can be evaluated on a case by
case basis.”
The source said the objective of the blitz was to curb
illegal transactions that could be artificially driving the exchange rate
volatility, thereby fuelling inflation.
Recently, the RBZ suspended some bureaux de change and
micro finance institutions over suspected illegal forex activities causing
exponential depreciation of the domestic currency.
This is widely believed to be the driving force behind a
sustained rise in prices, which has seen inflation galloping to new record
levels.
Econet and NetOne representatives could not be reached for
comment yesterday. Herald
0 comments:
Post a Comment