On October 7, 2022, NBE revealed that the bank accounts of 391 illegal Hawala transfer providers had been frozen, with preparations underway to open legal suits via the Ministry of Justice. With these tools in place, the crackdown began. NBE has also put in a system that enables it to monitor irregular mobile banking, internet banking, and account transfers between locals and foreigners, as well as the domestic market. Anonymous informants of excess holdings could get up to 15% of the seized cash value once the court ruled that the holding is illegal.
To further hedge against other such activities, the amount of cash holdings outside of the bank is now 100,000-birr for individuals and 200,000-birr for businesses. According to Yinager Dessie, Governor of NBE, informants are rewarded with 25,000-birr per illegal hawala agent they expose and also get 25% of the cash apprehended. What’s different this time? Well for one, NBE has introduced several incentive packages for informants who expose black market operators, in a bid to prolong the effectiveness of the measure and make it more appealing to citizens. Although the central bank has launched crackdowns several times prior to this, they had been mostly ineffective. In an effort to reverse what has now become a leading cause for the loss of considerable revenue to the government in addition to aggravating inflation, the National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE) has introduced a series of regulatory measures against this illegal market. It was found that a single foreign Hawala operator sends forex up to 80 times every week.
The matter was further complicated by the discovery of bank officials’ involvement involved in feeding the black market, along with the other two main culprits: diasporas and illegal Hawala agents.
According to Borkena, $1 was fetching as high as 120 Ethiopian birr, a two-fold jump from the 53- birr banks were selling it for. The black market for foreign exchange in Ethiopia has been exhibiting a rapidly increasing gap from the official bank exchange rate, passing through the 90-birr mark in early September before reaching the hundreds in October 2022. Ethiopia Cracks Down on Black Market Forex Exchange as $1
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