MKMVA demands harsher punishment for banks over collusion
Johannesburg - The ANC’s Umkhonto we Sizwe military veterans association has called for a Judicial commission of Inquiry into the banks after the Competition Commission found that 17 international and local banks colluded to manipulate foreign-currency trades and recommended some of them be fined 10% of their final turnover.
Chairperson Kebby Maphatsoe said there has to be "harsher punishment" for corruption by the private sector.
"The government must act decisively, we have been very polite when it comes to corruption by the private sector but when its corruption by government and ANC members everyone stands up as if a bomb has exploded somewhere," Maphatsoe said.
The Competition Commission found that implicated banks including Absa, Standard Bank and Investec used Bloomberg chatrooms to enter into arrangements to fix prices of the dollar/rand exchange and divide the market by allocating customers since at least 2007.
Maphatsoe said it indicated a pattern of high scale corruption in the private sector, following the finding that there was collusion in the building of stadiums ahead of the 2010 Soccer World Cup by the construction industry. All of South Africa’s largest construction firms were implicated.