Sasfin Bank will take legal action against a customer it says committed fraud that led to a credit loss that is partly to blame for its second successive double-digit interim earnings slide. "There was definitely fraud involved. We won’t take this lying down," bank CEO and Sasfin founder Roland Sassoon said on Tuesday. For the six months to December 2017, the group’s headline earnings tumbled 41% to R50.5m, hit by a higher tax rate and a single credit loss that propelled impairment losses on loans from 1.2% in the previous period to 2%. Return on equity halved to 6.86%. Sasfin was still conducting a "post mortem" on the loss, which involved a trade finance client inflating assets, said Roland. While the loss, expected to be between R30m and R40m, was "exceptional", Sasfin had to "acknowledge that our systems weren’t strong enough to pick it up", he said. This is the third successive reporting period in which Sasfin’s earnings have gone backwards. The credit loss follows two material...
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