A Bulawayo company is dragging Steward Bank to court to try to recover $74,193 charged as fees for rental of its point-of-sales machines.
Fortwell Wholesale claims the bank, a unit of Econet Wireless Zimbabwe, unfairly levied high charges for the use of the machines in 2016.
In 2015, Fortwell Wholesale had two of the machines linked to Econet's mobile money platform EcoCash, with access to the payment company Transaction Payment Solutions.
According to court papers, the agreement was that Transaction Payment Solutions would charge 1% of the total value of transactions processed through its machines.
But Steward Bank bought the company in 2016 and took over all its business operations. An agreement was then reached between the two parties for the supply of nine more point-of-sale machines.
However, Fortwell Wholesale claims there was a verbal agreement that it would not be charged rental for the additional machines.
Instead, according to court papers, customers would be charged a levy when they used the point-of-sale machines to pay for goods and services at Fortwell Wholesale."The arrangement was never put in writing, even after a total of nine POS machines were delivered to the plaintiff," Fortwell Wholesale said through lawyers, Titan Law.
In February last year, after its accounts were audited, Fortwell Wholesale noticed a charge of thousands of dollars by Steward Bank for the use of the machines.
The bank, in response, said it had kept to the 2015 agreement with Fortwell Wholesale that was in place at the time the bank bought the business.
"The defendant pleads that as of June 2016, the plaintiff was already using some of the defendant's point-of-sale units. This was in terms of a written agreement entered into in 2015 between the plaintiff and the defendant's predecessor, Transaction Payment Solutions," Steward Bank said.
Fortwell Wholesale, however, insists the machines it got from Transaction Payment Solutions were registered to EcoCash.
Despite having the same parent holding company, Fortwell Wholesale said Econet and Steward Bank operated as different entities.
"The written agreement alluded to was with Econet and for merchant numbers (over-the-counter sales platform) and not with Steward Bank," it said.
The bank wants the lawsuit dismissed with costs if Fortwell Wholesale fails to prove the verbal agreement.
According to its lawyers, the new machines were delivered without any paperwork attached...