The Bank of Maldives says it has set several measures to ensure fair access to foreign currency by limiting transactions on several e-commerce sites.
BML said that a few individuals are using the foreign spending limit on personal cards to conduct business transactions on certain online shopping sites.
It said that as a result, the Bank is selling large amounts of dollars for such purposes to a limited number of parties.
BML said that to ensure that the dollars obtained by the Bank are distributed for the benefit of a wider population, a daily budget will be set for the amount sold for such online transactions.
However, BML said that no changes will be made at this time to sites used for other legitimate personal purposes
The Bank also said that for e-commerce, fewer than 3 percent of customers are making more than 30 transactions per month.
It said that these are the same parties using the previously mentioned shopping sites, including Temu, Shein, Ali Express, etc, for business purposes.
BML added that, therefore, to ensure fair use of the e-commerce budget, the number of monthly transactions per customer will be limited to 30.
