Unprecedented Collapse of the Yemeni Currency Leads to Inflation

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) reacted with a letter from the head of the Supreme Revolutionary Committee, Mohamed Ali al-Houthi, to the United Nations, in which he pledged to stop the collapse of the national currency and pay the salaries throughout the republic just as was done before transferring the Yemeni Central Bank to Saudi-held Aden Province, southern Yemen. 

In the context, informed sources told YemenExtra about an alert by the International Monetary Fund to stop the (Swift) of the Central Bank of Aden, against the background of the contrary use of international financial standards in the printing of banknotes and purchasing of hard currency from exchange companies then transferring them abroad for suspicious purposes.

The source told YemenExtra that the warning included a threat to return Swift to the Central Bank of Sana’a, especially that the government of Hadi did not comply with the terms announced by the President of the Fund when the Central Bank was transferred to Aden in September 2017, and to use the bank’s financial and banking services to serve the objectives and agenda of the forces of Saudi-led coalition.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) controls financial transactions and external payments through SWIFT International and has already agreed to hand over SWIFT from the Central Bank in Sana’a to the central bank branch in Aden.

The head of the Supreme Revolutionary Committee, Mohamed Ali al-Houthi, presented yesterday, Monday, a humanitarian initiative to prevent the famine in Yemen, because of the collapse of the local currency against foreign currencies, and the continuation of the embargo imposed by the coalition for more than three years.

The Houthi initiative, which was presented to UN Secretary-General António Guterres and Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Mark Lokoc, included “the replacement of relief items in kind with the financial cash allocated to the needy families hand in hand, by opening a bank account for each family to achieve the principle of transparency and effective access to the beneficiaries.”

The head of the revolutionary committee attributed the aim of the initiative to “deliberate and repeated violations of the coalition that targeted everything, including the warehouses and convoys of the United Nations, and the associated siege and preventing or obstructing the arrival of a lot of assistance to the needy people of the Republic of Yemen, it has been mentioned in some reports over and over. ”

Al-Huthi said: “And so that the Yemeni people will not remain as a hostage for famine and we would avoid seeing the coffins of death more than we have seen already, in which the number of child deaths reached more than 240,000 children due to malnutrition, lack of basic health services and others. If the latter was made available, no Yemeni child would be dying every ten minutes, noting that this very large number did not include the number of children killed by aerial bombardment and internationally prohibited weapons. ”

He also held the Secretary-General of the United Nations responsible “for the continuation of the current mechanism, which is full of many shortcomings and imbalances,” he said. Yemen is experiencing the worst economic and humanitarian crisis in the world. 22 million people, or 75 percent of the population, need some form of humanitarian assistance and protection, including 8.4 million people who do not know where to get their next meal from.