Reserve Bank governor Lesetja Kganyago has revealed that an investor came forward last year who wanted to inject capital into the troubled Ubank but this was rejected by shareholders.

“There was someone prepared to put in capital last year, it was rejected by the shareholders of Ubank. And it is their decision, not ours. The only thing we can argue about [as the Reserve Bank] is that we want more capital put in and it is not the responsibility of the SA Reserve Bank to put capital into institutions,” said Kganyago.

Kganyago said this while fielding questions after the release of the financial stability review on Wednesday.

His comments come after the Reserve Bank placed Ubank under curatorship last week after the bank, which services mineworkers and their families, ran out of capital and faced corporate governance issues.

He also denied allegations that his institution rushed into placing the troubled Ubank under curatorship.

​The National Union of Mineworkers, which is represented on the board as a joint administrator of the Teba Fund Trust, the ultimate owner of Ubank, had previously said it was not necessary to place the bank under curatorship as there were investors willing to capitalise the bank.

Kganyago said: “In the past two years, before Ubank was put under curatorship, we put Ubank under supervisory intensity. The narrative that is going there, which is just plain wrong and not based on facts, that says that Ubank ... could have raised capital in 24 hours that they could not raise over a period of two years, is not backed up by facts.

“Any notion that would suggest that the issues of Ubank arose the weekend before Ubank was put in curatorship are not based on facts,” he said.

He said the shareholders of Ubank were informed throughout the years in which the Reserve Bank had placed it under supervisory intensity.

Kganyago said the situation at Ubank was dire, describing the institution as a patient that needed to be placed “under an intensive care unit and nurse it back to health, provided it is not terminally ill”.

He said the curator, KMPG director Zola Beseti, would assess the bank's health and determine if it could be nursed back to health.

“As this bank was going into curatorship, its cost-to-income ratio was over 100% because they were making losses. That means they have been eroding capital... and they needed to bring in more capital because the protection of depositors has to do with the amount of capital that exists within the bank. Its capital adequacy dropped below 3%,” he said.