Wednesday August 26 at a press conference, Jean Baden Dubois, the Governor of the Bank of the Republic of Haiti (BRH) announced that two commercial banks were sanctioned for non-compliance with the rules in force including Unibank which will have to pay a penalty of 865.4 million gourdes without revealing the reasons for this sanction https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-31658-haiti-news-zapping.html

Reacting to this penalty F. Carl Braun, Pesident of the Board of Directors of Unibank, in a circular addressed to Unibank and National Financial Group (GFN) employees dated August 28, explains that "[...] suite to the inspection of the BRH (April 2018 to August 2019) relating to operational and financial data as of December 31, 2017, the BRH imposed on Unibank, as announced by the Governor, a penalty of 865.4 million of Gourdes"

Continuing "[..] Unibank was surprised by the application and the announcement of this penalty while it was in communication with the BRH and that it was working, in good faith, on the recommendations transmitted by this last.

This penalty of such a large amount, representing the equivalent of US $7.2 million, is broken down as follows:

• Failure to transfer inactive accounts to the accounting classification "deposits not subject to employment", ie 59.8% of penalties;

• Failure to submit documents in the format required by the BRH, ie 32.7%;

• Failure to update client files (56 cases), or 7.1%;

• Exceeding the daily limit of the net foreign exchange position, ie 0.4%;

• Negotiating checks in favor of people banned from checkbooks (17 cases), or 0.004%"

President Braun of Unibank, specifies that this penalty, which represents "7.09% of the bank's own funds, which amounted to July 31, 2020 to 12.2 billion gourdes and 39.94% of the results of the current financial year (October 2019-July 2020) does not affect its current operations or its regulatory ratios, which are still largely adequate."

HL/ HaitiLibre