Recently, Minister of Finance Octavian Armasu said nothing of the stolen US$1 billion has been yet recovered. Speaker of Parliament Andrian Candu didn’t agree with such a formulation. The authors of a new Sic! article say it’s clear that one of these manipulates, while the other says the truth.
According to the article, 466 days ago, several days after the nocturnal investiture of his Cabinet, Prime Minister Pavel Filip promised a board will be set up for the people to daily see how much of the embezzled money is recovered. In less than half a year, a rudimentary table appeared on the website of the Ministry of Finance, about which experts said it is manipulating. The data from the table do not actually represent information about the “recovery of the stolen assets”, as they assert. The data is about the liquidation of the robbed banks. Since June 2016, the Ministry hasn’t rectified the information. Last week, the nongovernmental organization CPR-Moldova repeatedly asked the Ministry of Finance to provide relevant information.
In its application, CPR explains why the money earned from the liquidation of the three bankrupt banks - Banca Sociala, Unibank and Banca de Economii – cannot be considered “recovery of the stolen assets”. These commercial banks possessed many own assets, including real estate all over the country, garages, vehicles, equipment and others. In the process of liquidation, these are sold at auctions and the revenues are collected by the state for repaying the emergency loan provided by the National Bank of Moldova for saving the banks, which ultimately went bankrupt anyway. However, this money is not part of the process of recovering the stolen assets, as the title of the table says. So, these sums are definitely not part of the promise made by Premier Filip 466 days ago.
The existence of the problem was confirmed by Minister of Finance Octavian Armasu: “[The “billion” board] should show the money recovered until now for repaying the emergency loan. So far, nothing of the money embezzled from banks has been recovered because Kroll is working”. However, Andrian Candu has another opinion: “Saying that the money earned from the liquidation of banks will not offset the fraud is incorrect. That board or that information that is placed on the website of the Ministry of Finance is relevant and important”.
“Who lies in this case? Because we see a clear contradiction between the statements of the minister and those of the Speaker (the latter even apostrophized Armasu). It’s clear: one of these manipulates, while the other says the truth,” said the authors of the Sic! article. Economist Dumitru Vicol was asked to help clarify the issue. “I would draw an analogy with an ordinary bakery. Let’s imagine that some thieves steal equipment from the bakery and this goes bankrupt. As the owner does not hope that the police will do their job, he borrows a sum of money from a relative for covering the costs related to the remuneration and compensation of employees. The fired employees bear no blame and should be paid. The owner repays a part of the loan with money earned from selling the remaining equipment,” said the economist.
According to him, the repayment is not yet made by recovering the property stolen by thieves, but from money gained from selling the assets of the bakery that is under liquidation. In the case of the stolen US$ 1 billion, the situation is similar.
Economist Viorel Roscovan explained the problem this way: “In essence, they stole US$ 1 billion. The [robbed] banks became weak and the state as a result issued guarantees for strengthening these banks. Afterward, the banks are sold and the guarantees are returned to the state. But the US$ 1 billion remains stolen...”.
The full article in the Romanian can be read on sic.md. Sic! is a project implemented by IPN News Agency with assistance from Soros Foundation Moldova.
