President Emmerson Mnangagwa has said that freezing bank accounts belonging to a number of companies including Sakunda Holdings, was a way of dealing with people involved in money laundering.

Mnangagwa was speaking on Saturday Saturday night at a meeting with a group of supporters in New York, where he is attending the United Nations General Assembly. He said:

On the monetary side, yes, we introduced the one currency. For six or eight weeks, it remained stable, but then our people are very intelligent. We have people who find ways to fight that and undermine (the currency), but yesterday we also became smarter than their being smart, so we took some action.

His remarks come after the central bank, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, ordered all banks to freeze accounts belonging to Sakunda, Access Finance, Spartan Security, Croco Motors and related companies.

The move triggered a decline in forex exchange rates which had, during the whole week, soared at an unparalleled rate.

Changes in the exchange rates usually have either adverse or positive impact on the prices of commodities in local shops.

The country’s industry is in a parlous state, therefore, businesses are in constant need of foreign currency to purchase goods from beyond our borders.

Moreover, businesses use the rate of the day to price their goods, something that has resulted in a constant increase of prices in the past few days. Some businesses halted operations as the local currency continued to shed value against the United States dollar.