Typically, however, the price specified and reported to the Bank by the Somali exporter and Saudi, or other hard currency importer, was much less than that actually paid. This hard currency profit earned by the Somali exporter was either used to import scarce consumer goods for sale in Somalia or sold to Somali importers at the parallel market exchange rate which soared to over twenty times the official rate.

I.M. Lewis, I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Som…, loc. 607