COSATU Gauteng to march to ABSA Head Office tomorrow
19 April 2017
The Congress of South African Trade Unions will be marching to Absa Officesto handover a memorandum of demands following the bank’s involvement in a number of controversial activities that are detrimental to the wellbeing of the country’s economy.
The commission that was investigating a case of price fixing and market allocation in the trading of foreign currency pairs involving the Rand since April 2015 found that from at least 2007, the 17 banks including Investec Ltd, ABSA Bank Limited (ABSA), and Standard Bank had a general agreement to collude in relation to currency trading involving US Dollar / Rand currency pair. Members of retirement funds lost billions of rands of their assets through such manipulation of our currency. These are the only savings of workers and yet bank executives have faced no prosecution.
COSATU is worried that every strategic sector of our economy does not belong to us. The financial sector (banking and insurance) is a monopoly industry dominated by 4 large privately owned banks (ABSA, Nedbank, FNB and Standard Bank), two of which have significant foreign ownership. Insurance and re-insurance is dominated by Mutual and Federal, Old Mutual, Sanlam, Chartis, Santam, Swiss Re-insurance, Africa Re-insurance, Munich Re-insurance, Chartis, etc. ABSA is 56% foreign-owned whilst Standard Bank is at least 40% foreign owned. The South African Reserve Bank is also privately owned and has foreign ownership too.
Every day we live with the excruciating pain of looking at the economy of our country being squandered by both foreign and domestic capital when the country is engulfed by racial inequality, poverty and unemployment.