The bank said its South African operations suffered the losses, not its customers, and that the authorities had been alerted, the bank said in a statement without elaborating.
“Standard Bank has taken swift action to contain the matter and the gross loss to the bank is estimated at 300 million rand. This is prior to any potential recoveries that may serve to reduce the loss,” the bank said.
It was not clear when the fraud took place.
Officials at the bank were not available to comment.
Meanwhile, South Africa’s Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan is not being investigated for espionage over his part in establishing a surveillance unit in the revenue service and does not face arrest, the state prosecutor and police said on Monday.
The elite Hawks police unit is investigating a tax surveillance unit within the South African Revenue Service (SARS) set up in 2007 when Gordhan was the commissioner of the revenue authority.
Gordhan, who headed SARS from 1999 to 2009, has said the spy unit set up at the tax agency was lawful.
The National Prosecuting Authority head Shaun Abrahams asked South Africans to “stop deriving political mileage of this matter,” after media reports last week that the minister’s arrest was imminent.
“There are no charges of espionage being investigated against minister Gordhan,” Abrahams told a news conference.
“In the event that the minister is implicated, I will make the decision at the conclusion of the investigation as to whether or not any person or persons must be prosecuted, including the minister.”
Hawks spokesman Hangwani Mulaudzi had said earlier Gordhan was not a suspect and that police were not singling out the finance minister in its investigation of the surveillance unit, reports Reuters.
The Sunday Independent reported at the weekend that Hawks chief Berning Ntlemeza had sent Gordhan’s lawyers a letter to reassure him he would not be arrested.
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