Zimbabwe government has with immediate effect,suspended Ecocash and all other Mobile Money Transfer platforms in a desperate bid to curb the US dollar exchange rates which have continued to rise above the government’s gazetted inter-bank rate.

These measures are to subsist until such time that the mobile money platforms have been reformed to their original purpose and all the current phantom rates of exchange have converged into one genuine rate that is determined by market forces under the Foreign Currency Auction System which was launched by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe on 23rd June 2020.

Government is in possession of impeccable intelligence which constitutes a prima facie case whereby the phone-based mobile money systems of Zimbabwe are conspiring, with the help of the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange, either deliberately or inadvertently, in illicit activities that are sabotaging the economy.

This includes, in the particular case of Ecocash, holding well in excess of ZWL$8 billion distributed across just over 501 000 agent/merchant lines as lat 10 June 2020, which is not under the scrutiny of the Financial Intelligence Unit;

c) Fraudulently creating and issuing non-attributable and non-auditable agent cellphone lines/accounts;

d) Hiding irreconcilable accounts in suspense accounts which hold huge credit balances for unjustifiably long periods;

e) Ecocash, in particular, is acting as the centre pivot of the galloping black market foreign exchange rate and therefore, fuelling the incessant price hikes of goods and services that are bedevilling the economy and causing untold hardship to the people of Zimbabwe.

In this regard, it has been conspiring with big merchants to act as their conduit through which they transfer hundreds of millions of dollars per day to runners on the street who then buy US Dollars on their behalf;

f) Rampant, often arrogant, non-compliance with directives issued by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and the Financial Intelligence Unit;

g) Facilitating illicit trade in notes and coins, at contrived rates of between 30% and 50%, thus causing artificial shortages of the same within the banking system;

h) Criminally allowing agent lines that were banned by the RBZ to continue trading illegally;

i) Using bulk airtime sales at discounted prices which are cross rated to phantom USD exchange rates, which further distort the Zimbabwe market and deliberately mop up US Dollars from the black market, thus forcing up the rate of exchange in a manner that has hitherto been difficult to explain for

the monetary authorities;

k) Failure to report suspicious transactions or to take action against them;

l) Creation of illegal transient and permanent money through airtime loans, unaccounted wallet-to-bank and bank-to-wallet transactions and other malpractices;

m) Maintaining unauditable mobile phone lines or accounts which are being used by criminal syndicates, in connivance with insiders, to steal money from subscribers through such fraudulent practices as teeming and lading;

n) Acting as conduits f