El Salvador Development Bank Refuses to Disclose Bitcoin Records
by James · October 31, 2022
BANDESAL, El Salvador’s development bank, has refused to provide information about the government’s controversial Bitcoin purchase, an anti-corruption body revealed on Sunday.
In a late weekend tweet, El Salvador’s Anti-Corruption Legal Advisory Center (ALAC), which provides citizens with legal aid to speak out against corruption, provided a document from the bank. In the document, BANDESAL says it cannot disclose the “confidential” information.
BANDESAL is responsible for managing funds used by the Salvadoran government for its Bitcoin projects. The small Central American country last year became the world’s first nation to adopt the cryptocurrency as legal tender.
ALAC criticized BANDESAL for the move. “The confidentiality limits the ability of citizens to access and receive information about the operations carried out with public funds by BANDESAL,” it said in a tweet.
El Salvador’s government spokeswoman did not respond Decryptits request for comment.
In addition to making Bitcoin legal tender in the country, and forcing businesses to accept the asset, the Salvadoran government has also launched a government-backed crypto wallet and go its residents $30 worth of the coin to use.
Bitcoin ATMs are dotted around San Salvador, and backpackers can freely spend their money at many of the small country’s surf spots, Decrypt found.
The idea was to get Salvadorans – and tourists – as excited about Bitcoin as the country’s millennial president, Nayib Bukele.
President Bukele has also bought a lot of Bitcoin via his phone. In fact, the only information anyone has about El Salvador’s purchase comes via its leader’s announcements on Twitter (he tweets every time he makes a crypto purchase).
He has spent $107 million on Bitcoin, data from the website Nayib Tracker shows. And the chilly crypto bear market means the leader is down $58 million.
The US government said this year that President Bukele’s Bitcoin law “posed risks” to the US financial system. And the IMF, World Bank and JPMorgan have also said the move was bad news.
A businessman, who asked not to be named, described the situation as “madness”.
“Even BANDESAL does not know how the president has invested the money,” he said Decrypt. “The Bitcoin investments are managed by him from his mobile phone.”
But despite the criticism, President Bukele remains popular: a CID Gallup poll released earlier this month knew the leader with the highest approval ratings in Latin America.
