The National Bank of Moldova (BNM) will be able to provide liquidity assistance in an emergency situation - emergency loans - only to a creditworthy and viable bank. Parliament approved, in the first and second reading, amendments to the legislation to define the concept of "liquidity assistance in emergency situations". Thus, the provisions which allowed granting of liquidity assistance to three insolvent commercial banks were cancelled, IPN reports.

Also, they have been excluded from the list of eligible assets accepted by the National Bank of Moldova as collateral when granting loans to banks for simple bills of exchange and securities, issued in respect of goods or commodities, as they are not commonly used on the domestic market. The draft law also updates the legal framework regarding the mandatory reserves for the purpose of monetary control and liquidity management.

According to the authors (PAS lawmakers Dumitru Alaiba, Sergiu Litvinenco, and Igor Grosu), in last years, the Republic of Moldova has been the target of major financial crimes - money laundering, embezzlement and fraud, with serious economic, social and political consequences. "A key element in the theft of one billion dollars from the reserves of the National Bank of Moldova was the NBM’s legal possibility to provide liquidity assistance in an emergency situation to the three insolvent banks, which subsequently went bankrupt notwithstanding," says the draft’s informative note.

The draft also maintains that this possibility was offered according to some legislative changes made just one month before the $1B embezzlement from the NBM reserves by providing emergency loans to the three insolvent commercial banks - Banca de Economii, Banca Socială and Unibank. Nonetheless, the current draft proposes the cancellation of these provisions.