Business Times reports that a trustee of the fund that owns Ubank, which the SA Reserve Bank (SARB) placed under curatorship last week, said they could have secured investors if the central bank had given them more time.
Mpho Phakedi, a trustee of the Teba Fund, stated that the curatorship could have been avoided and the trust could have managed the situation. He said the Teba Fund Trust began talks a month ago with African Bank and Access Bank SA, the local division of the Nigerian-based Access Bank Group, about options such as a merger “or them putting capital into the bank in a shareholding arrangement”. He said Ubank, which caters mainly to mineworkers, had been about to begin a due diligence study when it heard about the curatorship. Ubank was placed under curatorship after the SARB’s Prudential Authority (PA) found that its capital adequacy ratio was at about 3%, compared with an industry average in SA of just over 15%. Phakedi acknowledged Ubank had experienced issues with its capital adequacy ratio since 2015. “The account holders are mineworkers, who from time to time are affected by retrenchment, and the bank has to lose clients and people with potential to take loans,” he explained. The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), which is joint administrator of the Teba Fund Trust along with the Minerals Council SA (MCSA), which was previously known as the Chamber of Mines, called the decision to place Ubank under curatorship premature. NUM general secretary William Mabapa said they were taken by surprise last Monday by news of the curatorship. But, the MCSA indicated its support for the curatorship, saying the move would “help stabilise the bank, protect depositors and bring in a long-term strategic investor”.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Dineo Faku at BusinessLive (subscriber access only)
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