Leadership of Prosecutor General's Office, National Bank of Moldova heard in parliament on bank fraud case

Chisinau, 25 November /MOLDPRES/ - The acting prosecutor general and the governor of the National Bank of Moldova (BNM) today were heard in parliament on the case of carrying out the investigation of the bank system frauds.

Acting Prosecutor General Eduard Harunjen has said that the bank fraud represented a subject which still has no finality, and any information made public can harm the carrying out of the inquiry. “There are 177 criminal files concerning the frauds in the three banks. The files concern state officials, civil servants and business people. The sum of the damage amounts to over 16.4 billion lei, and we have managed to recover over 800 million lei so far,” Harunjen said.

According to Eduard Harunjen, “the Gacikevici group, Shor group are involved in committing the fraud; the extended investigation cause is concerned; the Caravita case, Platon case and Filat case, which has the most direct relation with the bank fraud, through influencing officials to take certain decisions. All persons concerned in the banks fraud are accused of taking bad loans, purloining financial means from banks, money laundering, influence peddling and swindle. Some of them are under arrest, while the others have been already convicted. The Kroll report, which provided information and helped the march of the inquiry, had an important role in carrying out the investigations. At the same time, we must take into account the fact that such inquiries last, the process of collecting evidence from outside the country is complicated, for this, we cooperate with the investigation services from abroad,” Harunjen said.       

For his part, Governor of the National Bank of Moldova Sergiu Cioclea said that the first tender to employ an inquiry firm had been initiated in 2015; subsequently, a contract was signed with the Kroll Company on 28 January, the same year. “The goal of the analysis was to watch the flows of funds, movement of bad loans and recovery of embezzled funds. The Kroll Company analyzed the financial flows during three years. According to the analyses, the funds went from the banks from Moldova to two banks from Latvia and two banks of Russia. During the work, tens of thousands of transactions were analyzed, with hundreds of accounts from Moldova, Estonia, Latvia and Russia. Thus, a part of the sums seem to be placed on accounts of persons who have relation with other persons from Moldova,” Cioclea said.       

Also, the BNM governor specified that, next week, he would have a meeting with representatives of the Kroll Company, to see how the funds can be recovered. “I notice that, on the period November 2014 – October 2015, BNM provided Banca de Economii (Savings Bank) S.A. (stock company), commercial bank Banca Sociala S.A. (Social Bank) and commercial bank Unibank S.A. emergency loans insured with state guarantees, worth 14.1 billion lei. Starting from the date when the licences of the three banks were withdrawn so far, these banks have paid off a debt related to the emergency loan borrowed from BNM, amounting to 833.3 million lei, from the means collected following the reimbursement of debtors’ loans, sale of assets and reserves in accounts at the date of withdrawal of the licences; and we think that we will be able to recover another 650 million lei. A good deal of the assets is in civil actions, however,” Cioclea added.      

The first report of the company was published by Parliament Speaker Andrian Candu in early May 2015.  

The Kroll Company started investigations on 11 February 2015.   

(Reporter A. Plitoc, editor M. Jantovan)