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THE Deposit Protection Board (DPC) will soon be auctioning defunct Allied Bank Limited’s treasury bills.
The TBs held by Allied Bank – which is in the process of undergoing liquidation – were part of the wider $30 million worth of Treasury Bills that were issued by the government to several local banks in 2014.
The bills, of between two to five years, were meant to counterbalance amounts in arrears to tobacco farmers under the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) Tobacco Retention Scheme.
Besides Allied Bank, other financial services providers who received the TBs included Stanbic, Stanchart, ZB, FBC and CBZ bank, Agribank, NMB, Metbank, Ecobank, MBCA and Barclays.
DPC chief executive John Chikura – and Allied Bank’s liquidator – has called on clients of the redundant bank to approach the corporation with a view to speeding up the process of issuing the TBs.
“All former clients of Allied Bank Limited who had Foreign Currency Accounts and Tobacco Retention Accounts, which were later converted to Treasury Bills by the Reserve bank of Zimbabwe to contact the Liquidation Agent in order to expedite the process of issuing these Treasury Bills,” he said in a statement.
The TBs in question are half yearly coupons with a prescribed asset and tax exemption status at an interest rate of two percent.
They can be used as securities on the interbank market, which resumed last year after having been invalid since 2009.
The TBs are likely to be issued through an auction bidding process as per norm.
Meanwhile, the last special meeting of creditors and members of Allied Bank was held on May 5, but data on how much more claims were made on that day are yet to be unveiled.
But an earlier February meeting, claims worth over $6 million were provisionally accepted by the Master of High Court.
At the first creditors’ meeting held in June last year, 93 claims valued at $9,7 million were provisionally accepted while 15 claims valued at $356 196, 30 were rejected for non-appearance.
The DPC’s key role to protect depositors against loss of part or all of their deposits in case of a bank failure.
The corporation has however since admitted to facing challenges in liquidating Allied Bank because some of its debts were ceded to third parties, while most facilities granted to debtors did not have security and that crucial fact had negatively impacted on the rate of recoveries.
The other key issue is that all of the bank’s immovable assets consisting of land and buildings with an original book value of $16,7 million are currently in dispute, with the matter before the courts.-BH24.
Online Reporter