However, the government at large did not act on this recommendation for close to a month and a half. That's in the order of 100 billion kwacha, the Zambian national currency, some of which the government had needed to specially print. On May 22, MBBZ was officially put into receivership, and the auditing firm KPMG Peat Marwick Zambia was commissioned to prepare a due diligence report on the causes of its failure. On June 1, the government promised to repay within ninety days up to 500,000 kwacha to Zambians who had lost deposits in Meridien. For the Kasisi Agricultural Training Centre, that sum would represent a third of one per cent of what they had had on deposit.
Current estimates put their best chances of ultimate recovery at five cents on the dollar.
Other African countries hosting Meridien subsidiary branches had similar experiences, including Gabon, Kenya, Burundi, Ghana, Niger, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Togo, Cameroon and Burkina Faso. Officials in Swaziland, looking to recapture monies they believed had been transferred to the Bahamas-based parent company, launched a suit that resulted in its liquidation. Well, not all that much had had to. Meridien had been a disaster waiting to happen, and the only people who couldn't have foretold it were the millions of ordinary depositors like Paul Desmarais. By the late 1980s, the last of the French banks backing the BIAO chain was ready to abandon it entirely and allow it to trudge to an imminent, ignoble death.