Members of the Committee of Inquiry that has been set up to look into the collapse and rushed sale of the Portuguese bank Banif are to insist that the documents they have requested are delivered before the committee meets on Monday.
Weak excuses for non-delivery of the requested information have been sent in by the Bank of Portugal, auditor Ernst & Young, and Finpro, a company owned by Caixa Geral, Banif and Américo Amorim.
The Bank of Portugal does not want to submit the requested documentation as on the list is a request for an internal report of the bank's performance in monitoring BES, or rather in not monitoring BES, which collapsed in August 2014 and needed rescuing by the taxpayer and the banking Resolution Fund, together shovelling €4.9 billion to set up Novo Banco which now is not worth half this sum.
Finpro, a now bankrupt company, has not provided the requested documents because it snootily considered that the request was for documents that fell outside the scope of the committee's work.
The committee chairman has threatened "legal consequences" and a complaint could be filed at the Attorney General's Office for ‘qualified disobedience.’
The collapse of Banif is of national importance and the committee’s work is serious, so for the committee to be treated with such disrespect raises suspicion that arses are being covered.
The taxpayer bailout of Banif, just before it was sold on to Santander, in what now is viewed in banking circles as 'the sale of the decade', added 1.4% to last year’s deficit which came in at 4.4% of GDP.
What the Bank of Portugal still refers to as the Banif ‘resolution’ cost the Portuguese public €2.4632 billion and the Governor Carlos Costa still has his €15,000 a month job.
These figures have come from the National Statistics Institute and show that if the state had not decided to intervene in Banif, the deficit would have been only 3% of GDP at the end of last year.
