The Islamic Emirate has denied allegations by the head of the UN Development Program (UNDP) in Afghanistan that Afghanistan’s central bank is un-able to convert dollars into Afghan currency.
Earlier, Reuters quoted a senior UNDP official as saying that although the organization had $135 mil-lion in the International Bank of Afghanistan (AIB), it could not access the funds because they are not being converted into Afghan currency.
According to the official, the transfer of funds hap-pened based on a “clear promise” of the central bank that “cash will be automatically converted to afghanis.”“This did not happen,” said Abdallah al Dardari, head of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in Afghanistan, at the ACAMS Global Sanctions Space Summit, adding that UNDP itself has “$30 million stuck at AIB that I cannot convert to af-ghanis and without afghanis, as you can imagine, we cannot implement all our programs.”The Islamic Emirate spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid on Friday reacted to al Dardari’s remarks, saying the UN did not transfer dollars to the central bank for conversion and if the funds had been transferred, the bank would have converted it into afghanis.
“The central bank’s inability to convert dollars into afghanis is untrue. So far no money has been paid to the central bank from the United Nations or any other address. —AP
