NAN

Kenya’s central bank on Wednesday said it had fined five commercial banks a total of 392.5 million shillings (3.89 million dollars) over alleged theft of funds at the National Youth Agency (NYS).

The central bank said in a statement in Nairobi that all the banks had received a total of more than 3 billion shillings from the NYS on behalf of their customers without reporting the transactions.

The central bank said it had discussed its findings with all the five banks and they had pledged to ensure compliance with all laws in the future and to draw up plans for sealing gaps that were identified.

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According to the apex bank, the five banks are Standard Chartered Kenya, Equity, Diamond Trust, Co-operative Bank and KCB Group.

Dozens of senior government officials and business people were charged in May with various charges related to the theft of nearly 100 million dollars from the agency, marking a new effort to crack down on widespread graft.

It accused them of failing to report large transactions, failing to undertake proper due diligence on customers, approving large transactions without proper documents and failing to report suspicious transactions.

The central bank added that more banks would be investigated and the findings of its investigations had been passed onto criminal detectives to assess whether they would bring any charges.