The Senate finance-banks Commission on Wednesday launched the general debates regarding the three Government Ordinances issued in October that modified banking legislation, namely the National Bank statute, the bankruptcy law and the banking law.
Their drafting came as a condition for signing the agreement with the International Monetary Fund. According to commission sources, all three normative documents may be amended.
Senators would like the NBR statute to be clearer when stipulating the right of the central bank to provide other institutions with confidential banking information.
As for the banking law, Senators want more precise regulations regarding NBR control over the activity of commercial banks.
“They say NBR ‘may’ do this and that! But this also means that it ‘may not’ do this and that! The role of NBR should be better defined,” Dan Constantinescu, vice-president of the Commission and chairman of Libra Bank, told Ziarul Financiar.
The third normative document (the banking bankruptcy law) raises a technical issue, as the ordinance refers to Law 186, currently debated by the Chamber of Deputies, where it has also been amended.
According to Constantinescu, it is impossible to debate a normative document while ignoring the final form of the law that it refers to.
There was also a proposition that the three normative documents should be merged into one, but a decision will only be made next week.
Government Emergency Ordinance 97/2000, forbidding cooperative organisations (the former people’s banks) to conduct certain operations specific to commercial banks was passed by the Senate Economic Commission, which rejected several amendments submitted by the cooperatives.
On the other hand, Senators accepted several amendments coming from NBR, according to which credit cooperative managers should have a college degree in economy or law, while the ordinance originally stipulated they should have at least a high school diploma and two-year experience in the economic field.