So far, 2.285 billion lei of the total 13.34 billion lei bailout offered by the National Bank of Moldova to mitigate the consequences of the 2014 bank fraud has been recovered. This was announced by NBM governor Octavian Armașu at a press conference on Thursday.
According to the governor, part of the money was recovered from overdue loans owed to the now-defunct banks Banca de Economii, Unibank and Banca Socială; while other amounts came from selling the assets of the bankrupt banks. A further 850 million lei was collected from people convicted for being involved in the fraud.
When asked about multiple requests to declassify the so-called Second Kroll Report, Octavian Armașu said he was surprised by the insistence of such requests, considering that the NBM had more than once announced that it didn’t have the document anymore after prosecutors took it as evidence back in March 2018. “The National Bank doesn’t have this report physically. It was seized it as evidence, under criminal procedures, to use in the bank fraud prosecution”, stated Octavian Armașu.
About one billion dollars are believed to have vanished from three banks during 2007-2014 in what is colloquially known as the “heist of the century” or the “one billion theft”, although the exact figure remains a mystery to the present day. The government offered a 13.34 billion lei in a bid to bail out the troubled banks, but they went bankrupt nevertheless. Government officials, including the current NBM governor and high-ranking prosecutors involved in the probe, have been repeatedly criticized for passing off the proceeds from bankruptcy asset sales as actual recovery of the embezzled money.