Hi everyone!
Context:
We have received an ITA recently and are currently in the process of doing all the required paperwork. I have a question about the proof of funds though. My situation is that I was saving up money in a bank in my country's currency, but in January/February of 2022 decided to take out 2M of my country's currency from the bank to convert them in EUR because my country's currency was devaluating quickly and we thought it was safer to do this (pretty bad idea now with the war in Ukraine, but whatever). However in my country it is forbidden to convert my country's currency to Euros or any other currency so obviously the transaction had to be done in the parallel market. We then took the euros back to the bank and everything was good.
Problem:
IRCC requires a letter from the bank as a proof of funds and the letter must include the average balance for the past 6 months as well as the total amount of money currently in the account, but the bank won't give us this letter and will only give us an account statement of the past N months. Our concern is that the officer will look at the details of the account statement, see that euros have been introduced into the account, and suspect that the euros aren't ours (which isn't the case), and reject our application on this basis. Do you think this could happen?
Our possible solutions:
We plan to explain in a Letter of Explanation basically everything I have said here, except for the fact that the money was exchanged in the parallel market. Our rationale for this is that since IRCC technically only requires the average balance from the past 6 months, they should not be very regarding as to the details of what happened in the 6 months. Could this still be problematic? Or should we wait up until 6 months have passed since the euros were introduced and then ask for an account statement for the last 6 months, so that the problematic transaction won't appear in the account statement? We could do this but then we'll only have 5 days to submit the application and send the application fees, which will require an uncle of mine in the US to do. (We're afraid that if anything bad happens, we might not do this in time.)
Sorry for the long post, I know this is a rather complicated situation, but I've tried to give you all of the context so you can understand where I'm coming from.
Thank you very much for reading and helping us.
Context:
We have received an ITA recently and are currently in the process of doing all the required paperwork. I have a question about the proof of funds though. My situation is that I was saving up money in a bank in my country's currency, but in January/February of 2022 decided to take out 2M of my country's currency from the bank to convert them in EUR because my country's currency was devaluating quickly and we thought it was safer to do this (pretty bad idea now with the war in Ukraine, but whatever). However in my country it is forbidden to convert my country's currency to Euros or any other currency so obviously the transaction had to be done in the parallel market. We then took the euros back to the bank and everything was good.
Problem:
IRCC requires a letter from the bank as a proof of funds and the letter must include the average balance for the past 6 months as well as the total amount of money currently in the account, but the bank won't give us this letter and will only give us an account statement of the past N months. Our concern is that the officer will look at the details of the account statement, see that euros have been introduced into the account, and suspect that the euros aren't ours (which isn't the case), and reject our application on this basis. Do you think this could happen?
Our possible solutions:
We plan to explain in a Letter of Explanation basically everything I have said here, except for the fact that the money was exchanged in the parallel market. Our rationale for this is that since IRCC technically only requires the average balance from the past 6 months, they should not be very regarding as to the details of what happened in the 6 months. Could this still be problematic? Or should we wait up until 6 months have passed since the euros were introduced and then ask for an account statement for the last 6 months, so that the problematic transaction won't appear in the account statement? We could do this but then we'll only have 5 days to submit the application and send the application fees, which will require an uncle of mine in the US to do. (We're afraid that if anything bad happens, we might not do this in time.)
Sorry for the long post, I know this is a rather complicated situation, but I've tried to give you all of the context so you can understand where I'm coming from.
Thank you very much for reading and helping us.