Socabank : A Banking License to Steal in Haiti
Let me bring you up to speed on Socabank before we slowly untangle the complicated web of craft and corruption that becomes so anonymous with this commercial bank.
Socabank was established in 1995 and quickly became the third-biggest commercial bank in Haiti after Sogebank and Unibank.
Unlike the last two, Socabank, according to a sleuth of documents made available by the Haitian Republic Bank, disintegrated under the heavy weight of bad credits and other fraudulent schemes.
Some of these schemes concocted by this bank’s administrators are nothing but mind-boggling.
See for yourself:
• Administrators give themselves outrageously high loans that they never intend to repay;
• Administrators forming other companies just to defraud the bank (a security company placed 10 to 15 security guards at Socabank bureaus while other banks have at the most 5); and
• An administrator pays himself $US3,000 a month to be his own adviser.
Make no mistake about it: The documents released by Haitian Republic Bank, the institution tasked to oversee the banking system in Haiti, don’t make for wonderful reading. However, one must leaf through the whole document to understand the sick mind of those petty thieves who were running Socabank.
No institution plays its role as expeditiously and efficaciously as it should, including the Préval-Alexis government that plunged into this issue rather late.

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