Pakistan’s central bank circulates misprinted notes, triggers outrage

Pakistan’s central bank has said it was investigating how some misprinted banknotes of Rs 1,000 denomination were issued by it to commercial banks, after a video went viral showing the backside of some of those notes as blank, according to a media report on Thursday.

A spokesperson for the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) said the commercial banks and individuals who have received the faulty notes can exchange them at the bank branches from where they received such notes and at the designated 16 offices of the central bank nationwide, The Express Tribune newspaper reported.

A one-minute video had gone viral earlier showing no printing on the backside of a few Pakistani Rs 1,000 notes. The person who shot the video did not appear in front of the camera but identified himself as a National Bank of Pakistan (NBP) branch manager in Model Colony, Karachi, the report said.

Displaying the misprinted notes in his hand, the man stated that they had received fresh currency notes of denominations Rs 1,000, Rs 500, and Rs 5,000.

While the misprinted notes appeared perfect from the front, however, when he turned the notes over, the backside printing was incomplete. He claimed that many packets of fresh currency notes had already been delivered to customers and expressed unawareness of how many of them were misprinted.

The issue came to light when a customer returned two such notes to the bank, he said. The manager displayed another packet of Pakistani Rs 1,000 notes containing two misprinted notes. He later claimed that every package contained at least two misprinted notes.

When NBP was approached to verify the authenticity of the video, an official stated that the case had been brought to the attention of top management and was under investigation.

The SBP official further said that the issued notes still retained their security features and would be checked by officials at public counters when people came to exchange the misprinted notes.

He explained that while the printing press prints millions of notes in one cycle, despite having a robust system in place to double-check the quality and reject misprinted notes, there is still a chance for some misprinted notes to be mistakenly circulated.