Corpbank Licence Trial Starts
Sofia, December 15 (BTA) - The trial over the licence of the
troubled Corporate Commercial Bank (Corpbank) started at the
Supreme Administrative Court on Monday.
The case started on a petition by the Corpbank shareholders
which challenge a decision by the central bank of November 6 to
take away the bank's licence and file for the Corpbank
insolvency.
The lawyer of the majority holder in Corpbank, Tsvetan Vassilev
through the company Bromak, said that their main grievances are
over procedural and other violations in the central bank's
delicensing decision. He explained that the decision was adopted
by an unlawful composition of the central bank Governing Board
because Vice Governor Tsvetan Gounev (in charge of banking
supervision) did not attend and the law requires that the full
Board attend a meeting making a delicensing decision. Gounev was
suspended from his central bank job over his possible role in
the Corpbank case but that happened after Corpbank had its
licence revoked - and Gounev was not invited to attend the said
meeting of the Governing Board, lawyer Menko Menkov explained.
He also said that another member of the central bank Governing
Board, Dimiter Kostov, should have withdrawn from
decision-making on the Corpbank case because he was in a
conflict of interest: his wife is an employee of Corpbank.
Furthermore, the delicensing decision was made without a report
by the coservators. He argued, on the other side, that the
controllers were incompetent.
According to the Bromak legal counsel, there is no proof of the
capital inadequacy of Corpbank. This is why the shareholders
insist that international experts should be hired to assess
whether or not the bank had good capital adequacy, what was the
condition of the bank before the conservators and what happened
with it after the arrival of the conservators.
The central bank's chief lawyer, Nina Stoyanova, said that the
applications by the Corpbank shareholders are inadmissible
because the shareholders' interests are not directly affected.
The object of the central bank decision was Corpbank alone and
it did not create rights and obligations for its shareholders.
The shareholders could contest the placing of the bank under
special supervision on June 22 and then its extension by two
months - but they failed to do that.
The trial was immediately adjourned for February 9 because the
central bank lawyers has power of attorney from the central bank
governor and not from the whole Board of Governors, as required
by law.
In a separate development, it transpired Monday that the Finance
Ministry has reimbursed the last tranche of 36.8 million leva
to municipalities from accounts they had blocked in Corpbank,
and thus blocked Corpbank accounts (76.1 million leva) are fully
available to municipalities. The first tranche of 39.3 million
leva was paid to municipalities in the form of interest-free
loans from the national budget.
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