Director of the National Anticorruption Center (NAC) Viorel Chetraru considers the largest part of the money stolen from Banca de Economii, Banca Sociala and Unibank is in the country. “I’m sure that most of the money is in the country, at the airport,” the official said in the hearing held in Parliament, IPN reports.
It should be noted that businessman Ilan Shor, who was placed under house arrest being investigated as a suspect in the case of stealing of money from the three banks, is a member of the Administration Board of the Chisinau International Airport.
Viorel Chetraru noted that the transaction by which billions of lei was stolen from the three banks took place last November. In three years, the three banks attracted deposits of about 10 billion lei and were to pay interest at a time when they didn’t make profit. “This money was invested in all kinds of duty-free shops,” he stated, making reference to the fact that Ilan Shor owns the chain of duty- free shops in Moldova.
As to the report by Kroll company, Chetraru said this report didn’t offer possibilities of starting new investigations as the NAC employees and the prosecutors knew the information contained in it and even more details, but there was no communication and thus no intervention followed. “I think the Government was unable to act because we were in a pre-electoral period,” he stated.
Viorel Chetraru underlined the necessity of defocusing on the Chisinau airport. “The investigators and prosecutors must do enormous work for this money to be recovered. We didn’t yet need an assessment mission,” he said.
Most of the criminal cases concerning the provision of bad loans by Banca de Economii were already sent to court.
According to Chetraru, the bad situation in the financial-banking sector is due not only to the three banks, but to all the banks of the system given their inefficient administration.
