Finance Minister Professor Mthuli Ncube says foreign currency accounts will not be raided under his watch. “I want to assure you that ...
Finance Minister Professor Mthuli Ncube says foreign
currency accounts will not be raided under his watch.
“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.”
On truckers the minister said : “On the truckers, where is
your problem with the truckers? We have just laid down the law to say you will
have to pay using US dollars , people can evade that, we need to think of
enforcement mechanism but the principle of them paying in US dollars is a good
one. The same for anyone coming to buy groceries, we are aware that our
groceries are quite attractive because of prices we want to insist that they
use US dollars but they might try to avoid that.”
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