US freezes nearly $9.5 billion Afghanistan central bank assets: Report

The US has frozen nearly $9.5 billion in assets belonging to the Afghan central bank and stopped shipments of cash to the nation as it tries to keep a Taliban-led government from accessing the money, an administration official confirmed Tuesday. The official said that any central bank assets that the Afghan government has in the US will not be available to the Taliban, which remains on the Treasury Department’s sanctions designation list. 

Ajmal Ahmady, acting head of Da Afghan Bank, the nation’s central bank, early Monday tweeted that he learned on Friday that shipments of dollars would stop as the US tried to block any Taliban effort to gain access to the funds. DAB has $9.5 billion in assets, a sizeable portion of which is in accounts with the New York Federal Reserve and US-based financial institutions. Some $7 billion was held as a mixture of cash, gold, bonds and other investments Ahmady said on Twitter.

US sanctions on the Taliban mean that they cannot access any funds. The vast majority of DAB’s assets are not currently held in Afghanistan, according to two people familiar with the matter.  Most of the rest is in other international accounts and at the Bank for International Settlements, a bank for central banks based in Switzerland, and not physically in DAB vaults, he said - leaving about 0.2 per cent or less of the total accessible to the Taliban. “Given Afghanistan’s large current account deficit, DAB was reliant on obtaining physical shipments of cash every few weeks,” he said. “The amount of such cash remaining is close to zero due a stoppage of shipments as the security situation deteriorated.”

No international reserves were “ever compromised” and “no money was stolen from any reserve account,” Ahmady added. A US administration official has also told Reuters that no assets of the Afghan government held in the US would be made available to the Taliban.

Ahmady said he had been told Taliban were asking bank staff about the location of assets, but added that they should have foreseen it would be impossible to access them.