Govt Will Not Raid Foreign Currency Accounts Again If I Am Allowed To Watch Over Them - Finance Minister

Minister of Finance and Economic Development, Mthuli Ncube has reassured the public that this time around, the government will not raid their foreign currency accounts (FCA)s. In 2008, under the tenure of then Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe governor Gideon Gono, holders of FCA accounts lost all their hard currency after the government raided the accounts to finance its projects and expenditure. Said Ncube,

I want to assure you that these FCAs will not be raided. They have been ring-fenced. These are kept offshore and you have a mirror account (domestic) which reflects those accounts. You know what happened the last time we did that when we shut them down, the US dollar just disappeared. So we have learnt that if you raid these FCA, if you shut them down, the US dollar disappears and you go back to disintermediation, which is what we have now…So we learnt a hard lesson. I would not recommend that to anyone to say raid people’s accounts. It is not a good idea, not under my watch if I am allowed to watch over those FCAs as Minister of Finance.

Announcing the mid-term monetary policy on Monday, RBZ governor John Mangudya ordered banks to separate Nostro FCA from RTGS FCAs within the next two weeks in order to preserve value for exporters.