Paraguay bank crisis: How much money is at stake?

Paraguay's Central Bank has partially returned savings to more than 1.7 million depositors who lost access to their money after the implosion of Ueno Bank last week. Paraguay bank crisis: How much money is at stake?The digital bank's collapse locked hundreds of thousands of Paraguayans out of their accounts and led to the lightning-fast removal of president Santiago Pena from office over his links to the catastrophe.

Money is trickling back to some account holders, but most of what the institution's coffers contained remains out of reach, including over $800 million in public funds. Of the approximately $2.8 billion in deposits, only around $335 million had been returned as of Monday, according to official figures.

How much money is at stake, where did it go and what are Paraguayan authorities doing to get it back? In under three years, Ueno had accumulated deposits of around $2.8 billion, according to figures disclosed Tuesday by the Central Bank's deposit guarantee fund director Jose Maciel.

Seventy-one percent of those deposits belonged to the private sector. The remaining share belonged to the public sector, mainly the Social Security Institute , according to data published by Ueno in June. Following the November 3 seizure of Ueno amid major solvency issues, the fate of the public funds hangs in the balance.

The guarantee fund protects up to approximately $37,000 per depositor and banking institution at the current exchange rate. An emergency law passed the Wednesday after Ueno's demise authorized advance payments of up to about $19,000 within one week, and the rest the following week.

As of Monday, the Central Bank had disbursed about $335 million to just over 1.7 million depositors. This amounts to 93.1 percent of those eligible for that phase of reimbursement, it said, although it does not mean that these people have recovered their savings in full.

Before its collapse, Ueno claimed to have more than three million customers, after its rapid growth made it one of the largest banks in the South American nation. The Central Bank has identified 1,867,000 Ueno clients entitled to access the guarantee fund, its press office told AFP, without specifying how many people do not qualify.

Maciel said the guarantee fund expects to return around $740 million dollars 27 percent of Ueno's total deposits. "The rest will have to wait for this bank resolution process," he said during an interview on Tuesday. Those accounts include companies, organizations, volunteer firefighters and public bodies such as the IPS or the national electricity grid operator.