The courts of law impede the recovery of the loans provided by Banca de Economii and Banca Sociala, which undergo liquidation, while the loans of 14 billion lei received by the two and by Unibank from the National Bank of Moldova will become public debt, stated the head of the Center for Initiatives and Public Authorities Monitoring Ion Dron.
In a news conference at IPN on February 19, Ion Dron said that the banks that are being liquidated possess property, assets and loans that weren’t repaid. To reduce the amount of debts, the state institutions should aim to recover the money, including by selling the assets of these banks.
Ion Dron said a firm from Chisinau took out a loan from Banca Sociala and pledged several possessions as security. On the settling day, the firm was to pay 40 million lei, which represented the loan and the interest rate. The company went to court and asked that the lending contract should be declared null and void. The court accepted the request and nullified the contract, arguing that applying for a contract is not equal to having a lending contract.
The case was examined by the Rascani court on October 12. In two months, it reached the Appeals Court. According to Ion Dron, a case can have such a fast road only when particular goals are pursued. This way, the firm owners will not repay the loan and will simultaneously keep the pledged land. Most probably, this is not the only case of the kind and, besides the stealing of the US$1 billion, the banks are also being robbed.
Lawyer Victor Branza told the same news conference they suspect that the process of selling property in favor of the banks is marked by swindles, corruption, tax evasion and money laundering. “The way in which the banks and employees sell this property is not transparent. The goal of these operations is to enrich those involved,” he stated.
According to Victor Branza, the national legislation provides several methods of selling pledged or mortgaged property such as direct negotiations, sale at auction, sale under court control and taking over of possessions by creditors. Legal auctions are seldom held. Most of the times, the property is sold by direct negotiations to phantom companies created by functionaries of these banks.
Given such circumstances, Ion Dron and Victor Branza called on the prosecutor general to order investigations into these cases so as to establish if the taken decisions were legal. They also asked that the liquidators of the three banks should be questioned in Parliament during the first sittings of the current session.
