PwC is 100% mistaken in the BPA case

“The consulting firm worked irresponsibly in a handover scenario, affecting thousands of clients who trusted their assets to the Principality of Andorra”

The amount of irregularities surrounding the second most important consulting firm in the world, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), has brought in serious consequences over thousands of Andorran nationals and thousands of people who trusted their assets to the Principality, due to the firm’s legally wrong and ethically inacceptable actions regarding the intervention of the Banca Privada d’Andorra (BPA).

According to their professional services report about BPA Remedial Action Plan, dated February 29 2016, PwC relied on a money laundering perspective to classify clients into “Fit” and “Unfit”, applying a methodology of their own. As defined in this report, PwC used blacklists and procedures from 2015 in order to classify client portfolios from 2007, meaning, they must have had some kind of supernatural powers to know the regulations and lists from the future.

The first phase of this methodology consists of a list-filtering process. PwC basically checked whether or not each client was found on blacklists that were created from people who were connected to active processes at the Andorran courts and the Financial Intelligence Unit of Andorra (UIFAND). Therefore, if a BPA client had a connection of some sort to any of the people listed on blacklists by either the courts or the UIFAND, they were immediately considered “Unfit”, disregarding the fact that these clients had not been found guilty by any court, not then and not now.

According to an analysis made by experts on the subject, the presidency of PwC did not comply with the criteria to be an independent valuator who could estimate the destruction of value BPA would have, be it in a bank resolution, or a liquidation. That means the Andorran State Agency for Resolution of Banking Institutions (AREB) hired PwC as the valuator despite of not meeting the criteria of independence, because of the big remediation contract they had.

Furthermore, apparently PwC was not aware of the legal obligation provided in article 5 of the Law 8/2015: as previous step to start a resolution from the AREB, they first had to verify that the destruction of value would be higher in a liquidation process. It failed to estimate the losses in both a liquidation and a continuity scenario, but not in a settlement scenario.

Within the estimates made by PwC, no references are found to the blocking of BPA’s equity account in Switzerland. The firm worked irresponsibly in a handover scenario of BPA clients to the bridge entity, in spite of the equity asset being blocked and not in a position to be handed over from BPA to Vall Banc, causing patrimonial conflicts up to these days. In other words, PwC advised to move forward with the settlement process without neither detecting this problem nor estimating the appropriate destruction of value.

Up to this day, thousands of clients remain with their savings blocked at BPA, or at Vall Banc, in relation to equity matter, regardless of the fact that no evidence has been found of a link to money laundering. This would suggest that the criteria applied by PwC to classify the “Unfit” clients concerning money laundering, has had a rate of error of 100 per cent since the very beginning.

The International Rights were undermined:

Furthermore, renowned Spanish attorneys such as Jaume Alonso-Cuevillas and Andreu Van den Eynde, depicted a scenery of injustice in the BPA case where both the Spanish government and the Principality incurred in numerous violations of international rights. This was during a session about “Fundamental Rights in Europe, endangered?” recently organized by the Andorran Institute of Human Rights (IDHA).

The law experts have unanimously agreed that the most serious matter in all this is that the courts are all “changing the interpretation of the laws”, and they have demanded that the European judicial authorities give explanations on all the fundamental violations that occurred during the BPA case. During their presentations, they exposed the seriousness of this and other situations before Enric Casadevall, the president of the High Council of Justice (CSJ); Eric Anglada, magistrate of Courts, and Manel Santolària, the mayor in charge of investigating the threats and extortions against BPA executives.

The attorneys de Puigdemont and Junqueras were the ones who generated the most interest during the symposium, and they are convinced that in the period between now and August, there will be a European jurisdiction that will issue some kind of resolution which “is going to bring out the true colors of the Spanish justice”. They closed their session on a more serious note: “There is no greater injustice than the one committed under the protection of the rule of law”.