Saambou
defunct South African bank
Saambou Bank was a South African bank that was founded in 1942 and was liquidated in 2006. At the time it went into receivership, Saambou Bank was the sixth-largest bank in the country.
History
Foundation and development
The bank was founded on June 12, 1942 under the name Unie Bouvereniging. Shortly afterwards, the company took the name Saambou (Permanente) Bouvereniging. In 1970 it merged with Nasionale Bouvereniging, creating Saambou Nasionale Bouvereniging. They went public as Saambou Beherend in 1987 and traded under the name Saambou Bank.
2002 - Bankruptcy
The bank went into bankruptcy in February 2002 after newspaper articles speculated about it being bankrupt and customers withdrew R1 billion in two days. At the time it went into receivership, Saambou was the sixth-largest bank in the country. The JSE Limited stopped trading in its shares that same year, and First National Bank (South Africa) took over some of its mortgage business.
2006 - Liquidation
The bank was finally liquidated in 2006.
“Saambou” enters the record as defunct South African bank. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Saambou, defunct and South can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Saambou” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Saambou, defunct and South provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 2, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q13035977. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1942, 2006, 1970 and 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “Saambou” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.