The members of the Cabinet in corpore signed a guarantee for a series of dubious transactions that made the Government responsible for filling this gap in the banking system with public money, director of the Chisinau Market Economy Institute Roman Chirca said in an interview for Radio Free Europe, quoted by IPN. He noted that probably none of the Cabinet members read the relevant decision or they were pressurized into unanimously signing that secret decision.
Roman Chirca said the National Bank could have provided that emergency loan to the three banks without asking for a governmental guarantee. It wound have done it, if had been really motivated by the necessity to save the banking sector. What the central bank did was to cover itself politically as it transformed this immediate technical loan for saving the banks into a public debt.
According to the expert, as a result the money that will be used to fill the gap will be taken from the resources that are most often used to cover the budget deficit, for financing current budget activities like paying salaries, allocating money to the social insurance fund and making state investments through the state budget system.
Roman Chirca also said that this move caused damage to everyone in the banking system, including influence circles that own businesses and now collect payments in lei. “Their incomes will fall by about 20%. Thus, involved in this appropriation scheme directly or indirectly, they reduced their own value. In the immediate period, the gains from this scheme will decrease. Damage was caused to the whole financial-banking sector,” he stated.
According to Roman Chirca, if the money is brought back into the country, the Moldovan leu will appreciate, while the foreign exchange reserves will increase.
