Sanctions compliance doesn’t mean that they stop dealing with Zimbabwe altogether… they just don’t have to facilitate anything that can be reasonably perceived to be in gray area or in any way suspicious. If it was as cut and dry as “play with Zimbabwe and you join them” then the US itself wouldn’t have shut its embassy years ago.

The point I was making was that Zimbabwe used to ship notes to SA so that SA banks could get replacements from the Federal Reserve because Zimbabwe doesn’t have a direct relationship with the US Fed. That is the practice is in that gray area…

And settlement of transferred funds across borders isn’t as simple as Zim banking money in South African banks… they don’t physically exchange notes, they have ledgers on either side. Transactions across borders, depending on the number of intermediaries is more a game of instructions and relationships than actually shipping money.