NAIROBI — Kenya’s central bank governor said on Thursday he was not concerned by this month’s falls in the shilling and the weakness was not linked to plans to invalidate the old 1 000 shilling note.
The bank said on June 1 it would retire the old version of its biggest bank note in four months time, as part of a push to fight illicit financial flows, money laundering and counterfeiting.
Since then, the currency has lost a percentage point to touch an intra-day low of 102 per dollar on Monday, before paring back some of the losses to trade at 101.65/85 on Thursday.
Some traders attributed the move to people with big stockpiles of old 1 000 shilling notes converting them into hard currency on the commercial market before they become worthless on the October 1 deadline.
Anyone wanting to exchange large numbers of the old notes for new Kenyan shilling bills has to show where the money came from. “The movement it has had over the last few weeks is not an issue,” central bank governor Patrick Njoroge told a news conference.
Reuters
