Crane Bank: Cosase summons PricewaterhouseCoopers

MPs on the Committee on Commissions Statutory Authorities and State Enterprises (COSASE) yesterday agreed to summon auditors of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to explain how they came up with  Shs239 billion shillings under capitalisation of Crane Bank Limited.

The audit firm was hired by Bank of Uganda to produce a forensic audit and inventory report on Crane Bank as at 30th October 2016 when the bank was closed.

The central bank had said that Crane Bank was undercapitalised and needed to be taken over.

On Wednesday, MPs sought to get to the bottom of this matter and therefore agreed to summon the global audit firm to explain how it arrived at Shs 239 billion, as being the negative core capital of Crane Bank.

Earlier, Ben Ssekabira, the Director Financial Markets Development Coordination had said that the negative core capital of Crane Bank (Shs 239 billion) included paid-up capital by shareholders and profits made by the Bank in previous years.

But some MPs shot down this argument.

“For PWC to arrive at those losses, they should have made an extract from that income statement, if we don’t have that attachment, we can’t verify especially if the previous year, they had made profits of 52 billion. We shall require the general ledger and income statement for the year under review,” said Mbarara Municipality MP Michael Tusiime.

Ssekabira insisted they had no option but to close Crane Bank.

In the 2017 forensic Audit Report on the closure of commercial banks, Auditor General John Muwanga queried the failure by the Central Bank to prepare a plan to revive Crane Bank and the consideration of 200 billion Shillings from the bad books as the selling price for Crane Bank to DFCU Bank.

The probe continues.