AREB’s hideous, great robbery

“This regulatory body bought BPA’s illegitimate assets, without paying one euro and ruined both clients and shareholders”

The Andorran Private Banking (BPA) case is once more, for the umpteenth time slowed down following the suspension of the trial within the Andorran justice system. This is due to the lack of impartiality at the Court, needed to carry on with a fair trial and it will be the Higher Court the one who will rule in the end, while the most affected amount to hundreds of clients and shareholders who got trapped in the greatest financial scandal ever to have happened in Andorra.

Up to this point, nobody has been held accountable for this serious matter; the debate continues, whether the former bank managers are responsible for it, or the Government presided by Antoni Martí. Almost four years after that dark 10th of March 2015, today we know that it was all a conspiracy from the American imperialism with the help of corrupt politicians and policemen, traitors of the mother country.

The coincidence within all the deceptions and corruption, which caused BPA’s death, is the great bureaucratic incompetence, lack of transparency and cover-up by the financial Andorran authorities, among them the State Agency for Resolution of Banking Institutions (AREB), led by Albert Hinojosa Besolí, and the Andorran Unit of Financial Intelligence (UIFAND), led by Carles Fiñana.Furthermore, there is also the unclean audit process performed by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), for which they charged a millionaire amount of money, affecting more than 2 thousand clients.

In order to understand the deficient resolution process, plagued with irregularities, the revision of some background would be necessary.When the AREB created Vall Banc, a bank to gather BPA’s assets and liabilities considered legal, this entity left a thousand clients trapped in the “bad bank”, who suffered the losses of the liquidation process entirely.

Though a rigged investment of funds, the AREB became the sole owner of both banks.To start the bank operations at Vall Banc, the AREB decided to pull the rabbit out of the hat, presenting some papers called CoCos (Contingent Convertible Bonds) allowing them to buy BPA’s legal assets, without paying a single euro.

Unfortunately for CoCos, the ended up affecting Vall Banc’s profitability and hence, its real value.Vall Banc offered the CoCos to the BPA for 70 million euros, and in return transfers a considerable asset package valued at 70 million euros by the AREB. However, it was learnt that the assets handed over by the BPA were actually valued at 96 million euros.

In the meantime, independent experts, when comparing these CoCos to others issued by third parties, gave them a real value of 15 million euros; in other words, the value of the assets delivered ended up being higher, whereas the value of the received CoCos, lower.After this perverse transaction, Vall Banc was sold to the vulture fund JC Flowers, for that ridiculous amount, and not for 29 million euros as it was made known officially, culminating in that way in a transfer of more than 80 million euros, under the supervision of the corrupt Andorran state, to the private sphere.

Being these two entities owned by the AREB, they ran the entire business by themselves, resulting in a condemnable event which earned the rejection of many sectors due to the nasty way the regulatory entities acted.The truth is that Andorra just let the time pass by without lifting a finger to face a crisis in its bank system which could have been avoided, ultimately causing a total mistrust within the control bodies, considering that the letter issued by the Financial Intelligence Unit (FinCEN) was nothing but a means to use Andorra’s smallest bank as punishment for the Principality’s bank system.