By Spy Uganda
Kampala: It’s a grief moment for Dfcu Bank shareholders after it registered a multibillion loss instead of profits for the whole of last financial year.
The sad news was announced by the Board of Directors which said that in the last financial year, they made a ‘good’ loss of UGX11 billion.
Sources from the bank who spoke to this site on condition of anonymity quoted the bank’s General Manager George Ochom in a meeting as saying that shareholders should not get any dividend. According to Ochom, this will help keep the bank with enough liquidity to deal with any possible emergency.
Reporting about this mega-crisis Dfcu is immersed into, Mathias Katamba, the bank’s Chief Executive Officer said, profits tumbled from Shs24 billion to Shs13 billion compared to the previous years.
As a common excuse for most institutions battling various crises, Katamba claimed that the drop in profits is due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Dfcu bank like some other players in the market experienced a drop in profitability by 45% in 2021. However, the bank posted most of its income from earnings on interest on loans, but almost experienced a wipeout of this income due to provisioning for bad loans that accrued in the wake of the Covid 19 crisis,” Katamba said.
Meanwhile, some of the shareholders who might be in regrets for investing into ‘financially staggering’ Dfcu bank include Arise BV (58.70%), Investment Fund for Developing Countries (9.97%), National Social Security Fund of Uganda (7.46%) and Kimberlite Frontier Africa Naster Fund (7.3%).
