In the letter, addressed to AIEPC lawyer, Nuno Silva Vieira, Juncker stated that he had passed on the complaint received to the European Commission for Financial Stability, Financial Services and the Capital Markets and instructed him to look into the complaint.
This follows a statement from AIEPC on 9 September issued to “all European leaders” denouncing the outcome of the BES resolution and claiming it had jeopardised “the banking resolution regime in Europe” by running counter to the legislation in effect.
That statement had read “for the first time in the history of the European Union, a member state had applied EU legislation against the very spirit and principles protected by the norms” in what the same statement said was a “blatant violation of the right to private property.”
The AIEPC complaint extended to the lack of evaluation of the assets of BES and how the resulting ‘Novo Banco’ remained deficient in the formal terms of basic governance.”
In August 2014, the Bank of Portugal had wound up BES following its presentation of quarterly losses totalling €3.6 billion before dividing up the institutions with its toxic assets going into an entity that retained the name BES whilst the assets went into Novo Banco.
Earlier this month, the Bank of Portugal had announced its failure to reach agreement within the respective timeframe for the sale of Novo Banco and would launch a new tender on an as yet unspecified date.
In related news, the Bank of Portugal (BdP) has revoked its authorisation for the branch of Banque Privée Espírito Santo (BPES), a credit institution based in Switzerland, which means it will go into liquidation, the supervisor said on Friday.
The supervisor added that “all client deposits have been fully repaid and the value of the securities the branch was holding has been reduced to residual amounts since September 2014, and the customer portfolios have been transferred to other banks of their choosing”.
BPES was part of Grupo Espírito Santo (GES), which collapsed more than a year ago, with various ‘holdings’ filing for insolvency because they could not repay the debt that had been sold on the market, in a process that also dragged down Banco Espírito Santo (BES).
On 3 August 2014, the Bank of Portugal took over the reins of BES after it had presented net half-yearly losses of €3.6 billion and split the institution into a bad bank with all the toxic assets and liabilities (a vehicle which is still called BES, and where the shareholders are corralled) and a good bank, although it is only transitory, called Novo Banco.