17 April 2015
The third date for the Parliamentary Ethics Committee’s hearing into the action taken against FBME Bank’s Cyprus branch is next Tuesday, 21 April. A brief confirmation of the agenda is on the Parliament’s website at http://www.parliament.cy/easyconsole.cfm/id/326.
The website says the Committee will investigate “actions of the Government that could harm the public interest” in relation to FBME.
16 April 2015
On 9 April 2015, FinCEN, the investigative bureau of the US Department of the Treasury, published confirmation of a meeting with Hogan Lovells, the lawyers for FBME Limited in Washington DC.
To see a copy of the announcement and a related comment from FBME click here.
2 April 2015
Senior government officials, including the Governor of the Central Bank of Cyprus, failed to attend the scheduled meeting on 31 March of the Cyprus House of Representatives’ Oversight Committee. This meeting was intended to allow Members of Parliament to investigate the causes and consequences of the actions taken by the Central Bank against FBME Bank’s Cyprus branch and the impact of these actions on the public interest in Cyprus. The meeting has been rescheduled for 21 April and once more will be held in camera.
20 March 2015
Stavros Zenios, a non-Executive member of the Board of Directors of the Central Bank of Cyprus, resigned from the Board this morning, 20 March. He is the second member to step down in recent days; Stelios Kiliaris resigned a week ago citing the impossibility of continuing to serve in the present environment. Mr Kiliaris was also a member of the three-person Resolution Committee who imposed the Resolution Decree on FBME.
20 March 2015
A report has appeared on the news site of leading media outlet, Sigmalive, centred on a letter written by FBME’s external legal counsel and sent to the Republic’s Attorney General. In this, exceptionally strong complaints have been made about Dinos Christofides in regard to his role as Administrator appointed to run the FBME Bank branch, including the accusation that he may have broken the law.
20 March 2015
There is mounting evidence of the difficulties faced by people working for companies restricted to a EUR 200 a day maximum payout from their FBME Cyprus accounts. This EUR 200 level has been in place for corporate as well as individual depositors since the beginning of March in a draconian measure enacted by the Administrator of the Central Bank of Cyprus. It was previously EUR 1,000 a day.
13 March 2015
Despite facing a sea of troubles of its own making, the Central Bank of Cyprus (CBC) is flailing around with more desperate measures to prove it remains a dangerous entity. As the Governor and the CBC’s Executive Directors, one of whom resigned yesterday, face questions in Parliament and the risk of compensatory payouts grows stronger by the day, the CBC is focused only on furthering its own dubious ends.
12 March 2015
Reflections on the handiwork of the Cyprus Resolution Authority and Resolution Committee.
The Resolution Authority and Committee of the Central Bank of Cyprus (CBC) are very much in the news at the moment, none of it favourable to them. The latest debacle is the Administration of the defunct Laiki Bank, in which Cyprus account holders suffered huge losses of hundreds of millions of euros. The specific focus is on the Resolution Authority’s highly conflicted legal action against Laiki’s former Chairman, Andreas Vgenopoulos. The Special Administrator appointed to handle the Resolution of Laiki, Andri Antoniades, resigned on Monday 2 March, blaming the Governor of the Central Bank and the Resolution Authority for monkey business linked to the legal case, including the assertion that the Governor’s daughter is on the former Laiki Chairman’s payroll despite earlier promises she would step down.
12 March 2015
This article follows on from that above, Resolution Authority Adrift in a Sea of Troubles.
The Resolution Authority of the Central Bank of Cyprus (CBC) – actually its Board of Directors – and the Resolution Committee – three members of the same Board – appear, remarkably, answerable to no one except each other. They have bungled the Resolution of the Island’s Laiki Bank, causing massive problems across the whole domestic sector and have used a bogus interpretation of a Resolution Decree to expropriate the Cyprus branch of FBME Bank. In the process, they have caused an almost total collapse in confidence in the central bank, squandered opportunities to protect account holders and creditors, and risked compensation payouts of hundreds of millions of euros.
4 March 2015
Whatever the original intention of the Central Bank of Cyprus in appointing Dinos Christofides as Administrator of the affairs of the Cyprus branch of FBME Bank, it is now fast degenerating into farce. Of course, there could be also something entirely more sinister at work.
