BPA Funds, now preyed upon by UIFAND and AREB

“The interests generated by the 254 million euros blocked to clients, are used to cover the expenses of the enormous fraud”.

The millionaire bills that the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is demanding for having discredited the Banca Privada d’Andorra (BPA), need to be paid by the State Agency for Resolution of Banking Institutions (AREB), led by Albert Hinojosa Besolí, and by the good bank Vall Banc. These funds are a product of the interests generated by the 254 million euros, blocked to the clients who were charged for alleged money laundering, and that could remain judicially confiscated. It is all a huge fraud, which now involves the funds that the AREB has requested from the Andorran government to cover the legal costs incurred by the lawsuits of hundreds of affected savers.

Hired by the AREB, the discredited firm PwC pocketed a great share of the 10,95 million euros that the Andorran Institute of Finances (INAF), led by Ramón López, budgeted for the BPA case, and which was ultimately paid using the funds of the intervened bank due to the illegal auditing process, which was all along indirectly inclined to investigate, aiming at the criminalization of the bank entity.Despite the lack of financial authority of PwC’s irregular reports, the Andorran Financial Intelligence Unit (UIFAND), led by Carles Fiñana, in complicity with the AREB, insists on presenting them before the Andorran justice, in an attempt to continue withholding the legit funds from savers and investors.

On that note, it is worth mentioning that out of all the declarations provided by the banks, 44 were presented by the AREB and refer to the accounts of clients of the old BPA, who have not been able to carry out the migration process to Vall Banc yet. ¿What is Antoni Martí’s Government waiting for, to give back to the legit owners what should never have been taken from them?

The infamous story that began on March the 10th of 2015, was not just a Machiavellian, terrifying and authentic “conjuring” against the BPA and the Cierco brothers, the bank’s main shareholders, in which the director of the UIFAND, Carles Fiñana, has refused over and over to show the documents requested to him by the general advisors of the Legislature, arguing that such files are “confidential and a state secret”.There must be a reason why the AREB, the INAF and the UIFAND are the institutions that have received the most critiques regarding their lack of transparency; these public entities constitute the “black boxes with access to information”.

FinCEN’s claim was based on false proofs (information provided by Spanish and Andorran authorities); in other words, nobody had been charged with money laundering and therefore, the entire instruction had been poisoned by a kind of original sin, creating an illegal atmosphere within the whole BPA case.The truth is that the person who set into motion the State’s machinery on that fateful date, was not the general state attorney, but the current head of state, Antoni Martí.

The alleged support to the best interests by Antoni Martí, was an automatic and thoughtless reaction, since no consultations were made neither to the INAF, nor the UIFAND; on the contrary, the American FinCEN’s claim was given credibility, although the American authorities withdrew the letter against BPA in February 2016, following a legal request by the entity’s main shareholders. It is now known that the state regulators themselves certified in 2011 and 2012 that the entity strictly met all legal precepts entailed in the Law on International Cooperation in Criminal Matters and Prevention of Money Laundering, and that the entity also went through consecutive external auditing processes.

Fiñana himself confirmed that the BPA had not received any corrective measure or sanction in the last three years in regards to money laundering prevention and funding of terrorism.Furthermore, the INAF certified in 2012, that “the bank entity holds no negative references in its records, and has not been or is, sanctioned or unable to perform its activities”.It also added that the BPA “carries out its activities without any relevant incidents in the risk control system”.

The Andorran State, instead of protecting the fundamental rights of its citizens, took visceral and hasty actions seeking to justify the unjustifiable, achieving nothing more than the infringementof constitutional principles and rights, leading to this kind of investigations or inquisitions, more befitting of medieval times than a democratic State.