“Clearly, we must find a balance. On one hand, we have to protect those who access bank loans, but on the other, we have to consider the stability of the financial system,” IMF mission chief Andrea Schaechter told a news conference in Bucharest.
“Million of depositors could be affected if the financial system is undermined.”
Romania’s new financial agreement with the International Monetary Fund should include a series of stipulations regarding the personal insolvency law that would limit bank exposure to damage claims, an official of the central bank said earlier July.
“I hope that the next agreement with the IMF will include a clause regarding the improvement of the insolvency law so that economic operators cannot abuse its norms,” first-deputy governor Florin Georgescu recently told a round table organized by the central bank.
According to a survey from the central bank, Romanian lenders are likely to incur aggregate losses of some 5 billion lei (over EUR1.1 billion) following the potential implementation of a regulation allowing collective lawsuits against banks over abusive loan contract clauses.
Romania is one of the few countries in Europe that doesn’t have a personal bankruptcy legislation, leaving over-indebted consumers unprotected against creditors, a report commissioned by the European Commission showed in April.
The authorities in Bucharest have postponed twice the introduction of a new stipulation to the Code of Civil Procedure that would allow consumers and the consumer protection authority to file class actions against service providers, including banks, over abusive clauses.
The latest deadline for the introduction of the stipulation was set to October this year.
Should the new stipulation be added to the Civil Procedure, the banks would be forced to modify all contract clauses that might be considered abusive.
Additionally, the new measure might extend to various types of litigations between consumers and service providers, opening the way to possibly thousands of lawsuits by disgruntled consumers.