By Ralph Sesay
The Minister of Finance, Jacob Jusu Saffa, has told Members of Parliament that Sierra Leone’s two indigenous Commercial Banks are now in a position to start paying dividends for the first time after ten years.
Minister Saffa noted that this was largely possible because of the increased supervision of the banks by the Central Bank of Sierra Leone including restrictions on unsecured lending to Politically Exposed Persons (PEP).
The situation of the two banks Minister Saffa says, has improved over the last one year and that to further improve the governance structure of the banks, Cabinet has approved their removal from the National Commission for Privatization to the Ministry of Finance.
The issue of unsecured lending to Politically Exposed Persons is a subject of investigations in the ongoing Commissions of Enquiry and it was discovered that millions of Leones were disbursed to politicians of the Ernest Koroma government and that the administrations of both banks had failed to take appropriate measures to collect the loans from the PEPs.
The GTT Report of July 2018 has stated that in 2015 alone the SLCB wrote off Le 29.7 billion as bad debts while RCB wrote off over 80 billion Leones.
The report disclosed that unpaid loans to the Government of Sierra Leone including overdraft withdrawals with special request from the Ministry of Finance amounted to 45.1 billion Leones.