Catshanghai

We don’t like bankers very much at the moment. They spare us from keeping our pennies in a shoebox under the floorboards, but sometimes banks enrage us with their arrogance and inflexibility. We are reminded how Jesus got picked a fight with the money lenders while he got on well enough with prostitutes and homosexuals.

Why are we so vexed this morning? Shanghai’s Australia and New Zealand Bank (ANZ) branch have been treating us like international money launderers. We sold our house in the UK to buy a place in Shanghai, but have now exceeded our annual quota of $50000 for inward foreign currency transfers. We have a modest pot of British money sitting in our ANZ bank account waiting to be spent on building work, refurbishment and household goods, but we are not allowed to convert these funds to be transferred into our local ICBC account until we present fapiaos (tax invoices) proving we have already bought these items.

The logic of this situation is that we have to buy things in order to get the fapiaos to pay for them.

The teller was not very impressed or helpful when we told him he was having a common sense bypass. He kept telling us that this was the law and we needed to present the correct paperwork in order to spend our money. He used the age old tactic of quoting the law and giving the same information in slightly different and more confusing ways. They could have saved us a lot of trouble by making it clear what we had to do when we remitted the funds from the UK. At that time, they were just as useless, because they failed to tell me I had to present a long list of mortgage documents to release the money for a downpayment.

No thanks to the useless bank tellers, we’re looking into some workarounds such as getting the building contractor and vendors to issue us with fapiaos before we pay. We are also going to try to transfer our British money to a friend who can then send it on to our ICBC account. ANZ does not make Chinese banking regulations, but they interpret and work with them. The issue is that other customers must have this problem from time to time and we shouldn’t have to dream up such elaborate plans to make use of our money. The useless ANZ staff should have warned us of ahead of time or guided us through the process more constructively.

Update
Another workaround was to withdraw all the cash as British pounds before converting it into RMB that could be paid into our ICBC account, but that costs 1800 RMB for every 100000 RMB. We may have solved this problem finally. If you have a husband or wife, you can get them to open an account and then transfer the money to them in sterling, which can be converted into RMB and wired to a different account. The trick is that they would not have exceeded the limit of $50000 foreign currency transfer even if you have.