Russian bank assigns $12bn loan to African state ‘by mistake’
State bank VTB admits loan to Central African Republic is an operational error
London/Moscow — The impoverished state of Central African Republic (CAR) landed a windfall on Tuesday, at least on paper, when Russian state bank VTB reported it had lent the country $12bn, but the bank then said it was a clerical error and there was no such loan. The loan was mentioned in a quarterly VTB financial report published by the Russian central bank. The report included a table listing the outstanding financial claims that VTB group had on dozens of countries as of October 1. In the table next to CAR was the sum of 801,933,814,000 roubles ($12bn), more than six times the country's annual economic output. When asked about the data by Reuters, the bank said the loan to the former French colony did not, in reality, exist. “VTB bank has no exposure of this size to CAR. Most likely, this is a case of an operational mistake in the system when the countries were being coded,” the lender said. VTB did not say who was responsible for the mistake or how such a large figure could hav...
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