By Taurai Mazwi
The RBZ has with immediate effect suspended the operating licences to two more bureaux de change and entities breaching foreign exchange trading requirements pending further investigations and regulatory action, this comes after two more bureaux de changes had been suspended recently.
This was said by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) Governor John Mangudya in a press statement released yesterday, on the ‘Update on regulatory action against bureaux de change and entities breaching foreign exchange trading requirements and funding the foreign exchange parallel market’.
In the statement the Governor states that the two bureaux de changes have been suspended due to the lack of transparency and failure to declare or under declaring their foreign exchange transactions.
“Further the bank has identified two more bureaux de change, namely Shons Finance Services (Pvt) Limited (Shons Finance Services) and Superdeal Enterprises (Pvt) Limited trading as Kwik Forex which have not been declaring or have been under declaring their foreign exchange transactions, in breach of the law. The Bank has also identified three unlicenced entities, namely Stallion Financial Services (Pvt) Limited (Stallion), Forbes Financial Services (PVT) Limited 9Forbes) and Juso Global (Pvt) Limited (Juso Global), which have been trading in foreign currency.
“The Bank has with immediate effect suspended the operating licences of Shons Finance Services and Kwik Forex, pending further investigations and regulatory action. The Bank has referred the unlicensed entities (Stalion, Forbes and Juso Global) to the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) for further investigation and appropriate action in terms of the law, Meanwhile the FIU has frozen all accounts of all the above mentioned entities,” he said.
RBZ recently suspended operating licences of two other bureaux de change for suspected illicit foreign currency transactions highlighting that the two were under investigation.
“Further to the press statement of 9 April 2020, advising of the suspension of operating licenses of Cash Twenty Four (Pvt) Limited (Cash Twenty Four) and Crediconnect (Pvt) Limited (Crediconnect) for suspected involvement in illicit foreign currency transactions and for breaching the conditions of their licences the RBZ wishes to update the public as follows.
“Both Cash Twenty Four and Crediconnect were referred to the Financial Intelligence Unit which upon carrying out further investigations has charged both for not adhering to the anti-money laundering requirements, inter-alia, failure to record and report transactions, as required by the law. The two institutions carried out several off-book foreign currency purchases and sales, which they did not declare in periodic regulatory returns.
“Cash Twenty Four has since admitted the charge of failing to record and declare foreign currency transactions and has since paid the imposed administrative fine of ZW$2,500 000. The case against Crediconnect is still pending determination,” he said.
The Governor went on to state that the bank would continue to monitor financial services players so as to deal effectively with market indiscipline.
Investigations by the RBZ started when it became obvious that there was a flood in black market foreign currency trading that was driving up the black market exchange rates higher than usual, which was leading to a rise in prices of most goods and services.
