Nine banks, including Ivory Coast’s largest, shut down their operations one after another Thursday, further squeezing the country’s strongman who is refusing to leave office nearly three months after being declared the loser of the presidential election, The Associated Press reports.
Together, the financial institutions halting operations this week hold the vast majority of civil servant bank accounts in the West African country. The move is expected to prevent almost all government employees from receiving their salaries. Panicked people gathered in lines desperately seeking to take out their savings in fear of a cash shortage.
The international community had said it would use financial sanctions to dislodge sitting president Laurent Gbagbo, who is refusing to step down although results issued by his country’s election commission and certified by the United Nations showed he had lost the Nov. 28 ballot by nearly 9 percentage points. Among the sanctions slapped on Gbagbo’s regime was the revocation of his signature on state accounts at the regional central bank which prints the currency used in Ivory Coast.
Once that happened late last month, the Gbagbo government was no longer able to make deposits into the private banks where government salaries are cashed.
Private banks began shutting down earlier in the week starting with Britain’s Standard Chartered, France’s BNP-Paribas, Nigeria’s Access bank and U.S. bank Citibank. They were joined Thursday by France’s Societe Generale, the country’s largest financial institution, which announced it was shuttering all 47 branches of its local subsidiary serving 230,000 clients.
