Depositor: We have endured enough frustrations with Imperial Bank collapse

It has been 15 months since Imperial Bank Limited was placed under receivership. We hope every waking day that Kenya Deposit Insurance Corporation (KDIC) will announce a solution on how we can access our savings.

However, Imperial Bank Depositors have known nothing but grief. Grief served on a plate of inconvenience that they neither asked for nor were party to. Homes have been repossessed, children are out of school, businesses have gone belly up and many people lost their jobs as a result.

Also going on record as the country's longest forensic audit ever done on a firm, the "highly acclaimed", forensic experts, FTI Consulting are yet to piece together a coherent narrative of the exact situation of the bank before and after collapse. To recap the allegations in the court documents filed by stakeholders involved, it now strongly appears that Imperial Bank Limited was a piggy bank for Central Bank employees who benefited by allowing the bank to carry on years and years of suspicious transactions. To hide this, the regulator's team worked with the management team at IBL on doctoring the exit reports in ways that led to the fraud being undetected for long. 

In its defence, the regulator says that while the forensics audit is not yet complete and cannot be made public, there is evidence to show that the non-executive directors (NEDs) and the shareholders who nominated them to the IBL board, neglected their fiduciary duties and paid themselves dividends on an insolvent bank. Legal experts opine that the two parties — the NEDs and shareholders on one side and CBK and KDIC on the other side — can very well continue their protracted legal battles without any party using the depositors as leverage.

In more structured economies, they explain, the regulator would have sold the bank even as a discount as in the case of the recent Fidelity Bank transaction, or in the way in which Bank of Uganda dealt with IBL (U). Once the depositors and bondholders are out of harm's way, the regulator would use all its regulatory might and machinery to go after the culprits of the fraud.

It is not clear to date what the value of IBL was on October 12, 2015, neither is its current value known. For capital injection conversation to commence, any potential buyer — including the current shareholders, will need to do due diligence as in the case of Chase Bank. The due diligence would reveal the bank's current state of affairs. From this, any potential buyer — even if buying the bank at the expected outrageous discount, will be able to tell how much money is needed to resuscitate the collapsed bank or if at all they are throwing good money into a black hole.

Information on how KDIC has managed the bank for the last 15 months is particularly necessary, especially amidst the now controversial 40 per cent payout through NIC. The payout is considered controversial not only due to the number of times the ruling had to be given but mostly because it is not clear how KDIC will make the payout without selling off some of the bank's assets, an exercise that the judge has prohibited. Twice.

As the largest stakeholders of this unfortunate predicament celebrate the deserved but temporary reprieve, it is important to bring to fore the true scenarios of how the 40 per cent payout exercise is likely to handle and what aspect of their livelihood it will further affect.

In pushing the depositors to file for a clarification of the Judicial Review ruling even after they had filed for an appeal of the same ruling, CBK rightly anticipated that the judge's reiteration of prohibiting liquidation will be subdued by his allowing payouts. An email sent out by CBK's communication team celebrates the reiteration of the earlier ruling. It is not clear what now happens to CBK and KDIC's appeal application.

June 2015 published financial statements show that IBL (K) had deposits of just over Sh52 billion. With a loan book of Sh40 billion, one would assume that the bank had approximately Sh12 billion at hand. Given the history of liquidation in Kenya's banking sector, a trend emerges where depositors of collapsed lenders wait in vain for their savings as the receiver managers turn the entities into gravy trains, taking advantage of the situation to make enriching deals with the debtors.

While a 40 per cent payout is not only necessary but also urgent, it is not clear how exactly or when the remaining balance, particularly for the large depositors, will be paid. It is also not clear why from the beginning, CBK has made it impossible for any recovery efforts to progress leaving the bank only with the liquidation option.

CBK is on record confirming that the bank had Sh87 billion deposits when the bank collapsed. The bank had more money than what was disclosed in the CBK approved published financial statement on June 2015, four months before the lender was placed in receivership.

What is clear is that the bank did not have liquidity problems; which raises the question of whose money was actually lost in the bank. It is not practical, even for the existing shareholders to come up with a recovery plan if CBK has not permitted any party to look at the bank's state of affairs. The Sh10 billion that was committed by the shareholders could have been withdrawn for this same reason.

At the end of it all, we all wait to see how CBK will get us, the large depositors our 100 per cent payout without courting more legal roadblocks to blame for being unable to resolve what could have been resolved with weeks of collapse.

-The writer is a Development Consultant and a depositor at IBL.