Hawalla

In view of the provisions of the Payment of Wages Act, the question as to whether “hawalla payments” arranged by mill agents to their operatives going on leave should continue to be made since interest on such payments is no longer permissible, was considered by the Labour and Technical Advisory […]

It is much more difficult when you are dealing with underground banking systems, hawalla systems, et cetera, when expatriate workers are trying to transfer money back home and there are no records or very little records to speak of.

Twenty-seven-year-old Abdul Salaam, his 50-year-old brother Haji Osman Khan and his 19-year-old cousin Noor Aslam ran a hawalla (a money exchange/forwarding business) with branches in Pakistan and the UAE.

Informal remittances in turn can also be stimulated by resorting to hawalla or other informal institutions during a disaster aftermath (Harvey 2007).

Where remittances from/to individuals abroad represent a significant share of FX inflows, an overvalued official exchange rate will tend to motivate some people to use informal channels for remittances—whether the use of cash, or other channels such as hawalla—and this can lead to a widening of the spread between the official and parallel markets.