Governor of the Bank of Ghana, Dr. Johnson Asiama, has announced sweeping new changes aimed at strengthening financial discipline and to protect the integrity of Ghana’s foreign exchange market. According to him, the era when corporates could walk away with $10 million cash is over, revealing that intelligence gathered by the BOG and its partners pointed to smuggling of undeclared cash in large sums of dollars by some people in excess of a million dollars.

Dr. Asiama noted though that the directive does not affect individuals who may need few amounts for personal use.

“For individuals like you and me, probably you need your few $100 or $200 to do something, that’s understandable. You can negotiate with your bank, and then you would have a choice, whether you want to take those few dollars, or you want to pay the commission, or you want them to change it into cedis for you, you are at ease to do that,” he explained

In response to concerns of stiff control of the foreign exchange market, the governor was dismissive arguing that the system is only taking advantage of what it has witnessed in order to correct the abuses in the market. He said, “It is like you have a soccer match. There’s a context within which the game has to be played, and so that’s exactly what we are doing.”

For a while now, Ghana has seen activities of some individuals within the business community to carry large sums of money usually in United States dollars out of the country without same being declared to the authorities. This among other things has adversely impacted Ghana’s reserve position which also caused a rapid fall in the value of the Ghanaian cedi. It is with this effect that BOG as a regulator of banks in the country in collaboration with other regulators such as GRA has put measures in place to ensure these large sums are accounted for. Governor Asiama has observed that sources of these undeclared sums are unknown whose activity defeats the country’s anti-money laundering efforts. He said Bank of Ghana is redefining the framework to ensure efficiency and accountability in financial transactions.

BOG has been hard at restricting the use of foreign currency such as the US dollar only in international trade thereby making the cedi the only legal tender for transactions in Ghana. However, based investigations conducted by the central bank, certain corporates which earned money through export rights into their FCA accounts wanted to withdraw large amounts in hard cash for reasons unknown meanwhile they make payments abroad. Therefore the Bank has resolved that, “corporates like that do not need those cash locally, any payments they want to make abroad, will be made anyway. And so we said no to such corporations, they can afford to play in that regime,” Governor Asiama declared.