In what is clearly a farce, the RBZ has cleared the companies accused of illegal forex trading back in September and unfrozen their accounts. However, despite all this, they have also seized part of the funds ($1 billion) so far from these accounts and are using them to support agriculture this season.

It would appear it’s not just Croco Motors whose accounts has been unfrozen. According to the Herald:

The accounts — which have since been unfrozen — belong to companies including Sakunda, Access Finance, Spartan Security, Croco Motors.

I cannot say I am surprised that these actors were cleared. There was never really any other possible outcome considering the political juice of the accused. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not saying these individuals were guilty of any crime in this instance.

In fact, the Herald seems to suggest these funds were used to cause depreciation of the local dollar. The conclusion might be that they did it but they are not guilty.

The funds were reportedly behind the massive depreciation of the Zimbabwe dollar over the period February to September after the country reintroduced local currency in February, still under multicurrency and when it adopted mono-currency in June this year

One has to wonder why if they were not guilty they are now being essentially “punished”:

What the Reserve Bank did was to freeze those accounts of the five companies and individuals . . . and the proceeds of the freezing have been converted into a savings bond with interest and these funds have been sterilised. They are no longer in the market.
They can no longer be used for speculative purposes. We have been moving some of these funds into support for agriculture. What we are going to do now is to instruct the banks to invest the funds on behalf of the owners. Owners are not losing out anything.
Eddie Cross on the outcome of the investigation