Were not to blame for Chase Banks woes-Bloggers

The Bloggers Association of Kenya (Bake) has come out to state that its’ members are in no way responsible for the crisis at Chase Bank.

In a strongly-worded response to Central Bank’s Thursday announcement that blamed liquidly challenges on “inaccurate social media reports”, the association stated that the association stated that “nothing could be further from the truth”.

“Chase Bank was put under receivership on 7th April, 2016 for liquidity challenges due to lack of integrity by the management. None of the top directors; the Chairman and the Chief Executive are bloggers. No blogger or social media user was the recipient of the huge loans the directors and staff of the bank gave themselves, against banking regulations,” read the letter signed by Bake Director James Wamathai.

Wamathai went on to state that blaming bloggers and social media users only furthers the narrative the government is out to fight the freedom of expression.

“This line of thought is not new and it provides fodder to a narrative of intent to muzzle freedom of expression. Social media is only a conduit. The medium provides a platform to share information that already exists. Muzzling it is a futile attempt to fight a person and institutions who deliver what is already there,” read the statement.

In the same breath, Wamathai condemned those who use digital media platform to spread fallacious rumours.

“No Kenyan online should take advantage of freedom of expression to disseminate information to either destabilize the banking sector, or any other individual or institution. We stand for responsible freedoms,” he wrote.

These views were echoed by numerous social media users.

From the books, looks like the wenyenchi were warning each other about Chase from October 2015 and now it's bloggers who've been arrested?

— Ory Okolloh Mwangi (@kenyanpundit) April 8, 2016

Social media didn't kill Chase Bank, it's managers did. End of discussion.

— Bel Akinyi (@BelAkinyii) April 7, 2016

Please don't point fingers at Social media. They didn't bring Chase Bank down. Greed did the job

— Tim Njiru (@timnjiru) April 7, 2016

On Thursday, Central Bank of Kenya Placed Chase Bank under receivership after it emerged the bank had concealed the amount of insider loans it had disbursed.

Since then, Inspector General Joseph Boinett ordered for the immediate arrest of two Chase Bank directors and six National Bank top managers.