Imperial Bank depositors lobby warns against multiple lawsuits
Imperial Bank customers outside the Mombasa branch read a notice of its closure posted on the gate on October 13, 2015. PHOTO | KEVIN ODIT
A lobby group pushing for quicker payment of large account deposits still held at the collapsed Imperial Bank has called on fellow depositors to avoid filing multiple lawsuits.
“We request all Imperial Bank depositors not to file any law suits or create other hurdles, at this stage, that may slow down the process and hence our payments,” said the IBL Depositors Lobby Group in a statement.
The lobby group has more than 2,000 members, mainly business owners whose accounts hold more than the Sh1 million maximum that Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) has authorised the Kenya Deposit Insurance Corporation (KDIC) to pay out to account holders of the bank.
Its call on depositors to refrain from filing multiple cases on the Imperial Bank affair comes in the wake of a case filed by Mombasa-based billionaire Ashok Doshi and his wife Amit Doshi against the CBK and Imperial Bank seeking to stop the use of rival banks to pay the collapsed bank’s small depositors. Mr Doshi has more than Sh1 billion locked in Imperial Bank.
The Doshis want the High Court to order the defendants to deposit the Sh1 billion in an escrow account in the names of their advocates, and have also sought orders to restrain the CBK and Imperial Bank from investing or transferring their money to other banks or to the KIDC.
The KDIC has been making payments to account holders of up to a maximum of Sh1 million each subject to account and identity verifications, through KCB and DTB. The CBK had set aside Sh8 billion to cater for these payments.
The lobby has called for the payment of all the remaining deposits, saying that their businesses are under threat due to shortage of working capital.
The CBK earlier announced that by the end of March payments totalling Sh6.8 billion had been made, with 39,860 depositors (equivalent to 80 per cent of depositors) paid in full or having not claimed their balances of less than Sh10,000.
Imperial bank collapsed in October last year after it emerged that its long-serving managing director Abdulmalek Janmohamed, who died a month earlier, fraudulently transferred Sh34 billion from the bank to his companies and bank accounts between 2002 and 2015.
The State has charged Imperial Bank’s head of credit Naeem Shah and chief finance officer James Kaburu, and the directors of W.E. Tilley Limited — the Nairobi-based fishmonger said to have confessed to receiving a third of the looted cash — in court on five counts of theft in relation to the scandal.
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