Owners missing of Millions of Dinars , aren’t you ?

Kuwait Upto Date • November 19, 2017 • 1 Comment

Millions of dinars remain ‘dormant’ in about half a million bank accounts in Kuwaiti banks. Some of these accounts have millions of dinar deposits while others are in hundreds of dinars, reports Al-Rai daily quoting sources familiar with these accounts.

These millions of dinars are ‘dormant’ funds and the banks have not received any contact from their owners or from anyone who is related to the account holders of these huge sums. Sources told the daily nothing is known about the holders of these accounts for more than 20 years, while a little is known about a few of them.

This may be acceptable in Switzerland ‘the treasury of secret capital’, and the biggest host country for trans-border foreign funds. In Kuwait, local banks consider these accounts to be the secrets of each bank and therefore do not have official lists of accounts. In principle, the neglected accounts range between the savings accounts, salary accounts, current accounts, and others associated with ‘dormant’ deposits for more than two decades.

The Iraqi invasion has contributed to the existence of money in the banking system without being identified so far. With the destruction of a large part of the local banking database, it has become easy to keep frozen deposits in the local system, especially for those who died before renewing the data of their old file, which disappeared with the application of the new system.

The fact that some of the owners of these funds have not been identified until now is because they opened the accounts long ago and don’t have their telephone number and sometimes even the civil ID number, which made it difficult for banks to renew any data through which to reach the owners of these accounts.

The source said: “One of the most famous neglected accounts in the local bank is of one of the missing clients. It was opened in 1990 with a balance of about 800,000 dinars, and was worth 1.7 million dinars during the last audit in 2015. The bank did not see any movement on this account or contact from its owner or one of its heirs during the past 27 years. The database of neglected accounts varies, according to sources, between “dormant deposits”, some two million, and others running from 50 dinars. In this regard, the banks are now allowed to freeze savings accounts, ‘salary’ and ‘current’ accounts, to read ‘zero balance’, if no movement is made within 180 days, and closing these accounts these accounts if no movement is made within 913 days. Such assets will be transferred to other special accounts in order to protect the rights of customers if they appear.

Source : Arabtimes

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