(Ecofin Agency) - Vneshtorgbank, Russian Foreign Trade Bank, mistakenly assigned a $12 billion loan as granted to the Central African Republic, Reuters reported.

The loan was mentioned in a quarterly report published by the Russian bank. In that report, there was a chart listing VTB’s outstanding loans to a dozen countries at the period ended October 1, 2018. In the chart, next to the Central African Republic, there was the figure RUB 801,933,814,000 (about $12 billion), more than six times the GDP of that country.

Questioned about it, the bank declared that it was, in fact, a substantive error, not a loan. "VTB bank has no exposure of this size to CAR. Most likely, this is a case of an operational mistake in the system when the countries were being coded", the bank said in a statement sent to Reuters.

However, VTB did not mention who made the mistake neither did it explain how such an important sum could be published without being spotted.

As far as they are concerned, Central African authorities were astonished by this information. The government’s spokesperson Ange Maxime Kazagui declared "I don’t have that information. But it doesn’t sound credible because $11 billion is beyond the debt capacity of CAR".

Affected by a serious ethno-religious crisis for years now, Central African Republic’s GDP is about $1.95 billion for a population of about 5 million.