Chris McGreal
Unwelcome uitlanders (foreigners) in the rainbow nation can now get more bang for their buck, or quid. But first they have to lay their hands on their own cash, and South African banks are practised at preventing that from happening.
It’s hardly a situation to invoke much sympathy hereabouts, but the rand’s periodic freefall seems to have a paralysing effect on at least one corner of the labyrinth of South Africa’s banking system.
What other explanation can there be for hard currency transferred from abroad mysteriously getting “lost” in the system for weeks on end?
Mine was a mere few hundred pounds dispatched from London to Volkskas three weeks ago.
It’s a monthly transfer which usually takes a couple of days to rear its head in Johannesburg just in time to get sucked up by the bond interest payment.
But on this occasion the money went astray. No one seemed able to find it or explain why. And I’m not the only victim.
Hanging on the telephone, waiting for someone to track down my cash, the electronic voice of Volkskas invites me to suspend what remains of my faculties and put the rest of my money into one of its special savings plans.
“It guarantees a lump-sum payout when you most need it,” the voice says. Like when the rest of your cash mysteriously vanishes.
Then comes the latest advertising campaign by Volkskas’s parent company, Absa. It is pushing what it describes as “non-traditional services”. Perhaps it should work on the traditional ones first.
Finally a human voice. The money was never sent, it insists. Proof is provided that indeed it was. Ah! Volkskas promises to look into it. A fortnight later it’s still looking.
Is this legal? Absa says so. It can whisk your money off in to the unknown and there’s not much you can do about it. And Absa is not the only guilty party. Standard Bank has been known to sit on foreign transfers for up to a month and only release them under a barrage of threatening phone calls.
Wolf Kammerer, the head of the national department of Absa’s international banking, says banks are under no legal obligation to deposit transfers within a specific period of time. “There is no specified time limit. The policy of this bank is to contact the client the same day the money is received, or the next day, so they can give their approval because they may want to take it to another bank where they can get a better exchange rate. If the bank is sitting on the money you can always claim for interest,” he said.
Or you can fill out a complaint form, although that seems to disappear into the same mysterious ether as your money.
And who pays for the phone calls to the United Kingdom because Absa insists the money was never received from London? Me, apparently.
So where does your, or in this case my, cash go? Perhaps the interest is siphoned off into some account to help Absa’s disadvantaged shareholders who have been suffering so terribly of late that the banks have ratcheted up the cost of buying your home so they can cling to theirs.
Or maybe there’s a Nick Leeson clone at work. He proved how easy it is to set up phoney accounts and keep them hidden from those who supposedly run the bank when he brought down Barings.
Alas, in my case it was merely a fax which Volkskas says went astray between its head office and the Rosebank branch.
Which brings us to the exchange rate. According to Kammerer, if the rand is on the slide, there is a small compensation in your money arriving late.
“When the exchange rate is calculated generally depends on the amount being transferred. Smaller amounts which the banks can dispose of easily are usually assigned the rate of the day they are credited to the local account. Larger amounts are exchanged at the rate on the day they are received but not credited for another two days to allow banks time to sell the hard currency,” he said.
So Absa paid a price of sorts. In the two weeks my cash went astray, the rand took another big tumble and Volkskas was forced to cough up enough to cover a consoling drink for England’s recent sporting flops.