Worker and US$1.1 million missing from Kabul bank
Shokofa Salehi, 22, worked in the money transfer division at the Kabul headquarters of Azizi Bank. She disappeared about two months ago, Azizi chief executive Inayatullah Fazli said. Investigators say she is suspected of transferring about US$1.1 million out of the bank's coffers to accounts of relatives.
The young woman worked uneventfully for three years at an Afghan bank. Then one day she vanished. As did US$1.1 million.
Afghan authorities have been scrambling to track down the suspected thief and several alleged accomplices. The revelations are another embarrassment for the Afghan banking sector, which has seen corruption already unravel one major institution.
Shokofa Salehi, 22, worked in the money transfer division at the Kabul headquarters of Azizi Bank. She disappeared about two months ago, Azizi chief executive Inayatullah Fazli said. Investigators say she is suspected of transferring about US$1.1 million out of the bank's coffers to accounts of relatives. Besides Salehi, at least nine people are believed involved in the case. "They are a mafia group," Fazli alleged.
An Interpol red notice - the equivalent of an international arrest warrant - says Salehi is sought on charges of fraud and misusing her authority. Two other suspects have been detained in Dubai, with one allegedly spending about US$850,000 of the money to invest in a tyre business and possibly other ventures.
As striking as it is, Salehi's alleged pilfering is small change compared to other examples of corruption in Afghanistan's banking sector.
In 2010, regulators seized Kabul Bank, Afghanistan's largest lender, amid claims it was nothing but a Ponzi scheme with about US$861 million in fraudulent loans that disappeared into the pockets of associates of the men behind the bank. Its near-collapse and subsequent bailout represented more than 5 per cent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product, making it one of the largest banking failures in the world in relative terms.