Montenegro Slates Report on Prva Banka :: Balkan Insight

Montenegro's Ministry of Finance on Monday criticised a recently released report by an NGO on one of the country's main banks, saying its selective interpretation of state support for the banking sector harmed the credibility and reputation of the whole economic system.?

?First Bank ? First Family," a report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, OCCRP, in cooperation with the BBC programme Newsnight, was released last week.

It argues that Montenegro's Prva Banka, controlled by the family of longtime leader Milo Djukanovic, was a ?business out of control", which ?became the personal ATM of the top leadership of the country. It was a bank that was not allowed to fail."

The project said that when the bank's liquidity was seriously endangered in 2008, the government helped it out with tens of millions of euro in loans.

The ministry takes a very different view, saying the measures that the government undertook that year served the interests of taxpayers and depositors because they sustained the whole banking system and protected people's deposits.

Concerning a 44 million euro loan to Prva Banka, the ministry noted that ?the loan was paid back according to the deadlines defined by the contract ... and the whole procedure was followed".

Meanwhile Montenegro's state prosecutor, Ranka Carapic, has expressed concern about the way that confidential information about the bank's clients and business found its way to journalists.

Before it released the project, the OCCRP admitted that some of the documents obtained by its journalists contained sensitive information on people and companies.

However, it decided to fully disclose all its details from the investigation, since, as its website reads, ?the story (about Prva Banka) demonstrates very severe conflict of interests, corruption, mismanagement and the incompetence of key members of the Montenegrin government".

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