Central bank locks out five commercial banks from IFEM
What you need to know:
he central bank has continued cracking down on bureaux de change and banks that have violated the code of conduct guiding the Interbank Foreign Exchange Market (IFEM).
After inspections in Arusha in the past week, BoT has suspended five commercial banks from participating in in the IFEM for one month.
Dar es Salaam. The Bank of Tanzania (BoT) has suspended five commercial banks to participate in Interbank Foreign Exchange Market (IFEM) for one month effective from November 23 citing violation of the law as the reason.
According to the institution, the measure was intended to enforce compliance to the IFEM code of conduct.
“The suspended banks violated some provisions of the code of conduct. They either traded at off-market rates and or did not submit to the bank the transactions they made on November 16, 2018 contrary to the requirements of the code of conduct,” Zalia Mbeo, who is BoT’s Public Relations manager told The Citizen.
According to the central bank, the financial entities suspended are Exim Bank, Barclays Bank, UBA Bank, BancABC and Azania Bank.
This is the continuation of the BoT’s move of conducting impromptu inspections that started with Arusha-based bureaux de change on November 19 that led to the subsequent suspension of their operations for breach of rules and regulations of the business.
Confirming the BoT directives, one of the suspended bank (Exim Bank Tanzania) in the statement issued by the management admitted saying: “Exim Bank Tanzania would like to first acknowledge that this is true and secondly offer clarifications on the same”.
It further said in the statement that the suspension only applies to US dollar alone for the mentioned period of four weeks within the Interbank Market and Exim Bank Tanzania was still allowed to trade all the other major currencies and participate in all dealings in Interbank Open Market Operations.
“We will continue to trade in foreign currencies with our clients as usual as there is no restriction on this. As our esteemed client, you will not experience any interruption in services throughout this period,” Exim Bank statement added.
