The Communists& Socialists Bloc has introduced a draft no confidence motion seeking the removal of Octavian Armașu from the presidency of the National Bank of Moldova, accusing him of poorly managing inflation.

After hearing Armașu in Parliament on Thursday, Deputy Speaker Vlad Batrîncea (Communists&Socialists) declared that the central bank’s intervention boiled down to “sterilizing the money supply, nearly quadrupling the lending rate, suppressing the remaining businesses”. According to him, the NBM only protects the interests of commercial banks.

“Today, Moldova is Europe’s champion in terms of inflation. This shows the professionalism of the NBM leadership (…) They are fighting non-monetary inflation with monetary methods”, stated Batrîncea.

According to him, Armașu failed to justify the “alarming” $650 million decrease in Moldova’s foreign exchange reserves.

The proposal has been submitted to the relevant committee for examination.

During his speech, Armașu assured Parliament Moldova’s reserves remain at fairly high levels despite the decrease, and that the NBM had to sell part of the reserves to mitigate the effects of two concurrent crises: the energy crunch and Russia’s war in Ukraine.