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Southeast Europe
June 15, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 14
liquidity. The run was a result of a complaint
by controversial businessman Delyan Peevski, who claimed that his previously close partner, Corpbank’s majority shareholder Tsvetan Vassilev, had hired three people to kill him.
The probe at Vassilev’s offices into the accusation led to the run and subsequently the bank was
put under central bank administration and an audit showed a BGN3.75bn (€1.92bn) capital hole. As a result, the bank’s licence was revoked and the lender was declared insolvent in April 2015. The Bulgarian Deposit Insurance Fund (BDIF)
has paid out BGN3.68bn in guaranteed deposits to Corpbank depositors since December 4,
2014. Vassilev is in exile in Serbia and is currently being tried in absentia. For his part, he has repeatedly claimed that he was a victim of a plot organised by Peevski and Tsatsarov.
Days before their warning about FIBank's owner, Democratic Bulgaria projected the initials "КТБ" - denoting the now collapsed Corpbank - onto
Slovenian lame duck government suspends budget spending
bne IntelliNews
Slovenia’s ‘lame duck’ government has decided to suspend all budget spending for 2018, except for items such as social spending which it is obliged by law to finance from the state budget, the minis- try of finance announced on June 14.
The country has been in limbo since the June 3 parliamentary elections precipitated the tough-
the Bulgarian central bank, as they called on
the government to take urgent steps towards membership in the European Banking Union. Speaking at the July 13 press conference, Atanassov also said that the prosecution’s actions will lead to a redistribution of ownership in Bulgarian banks, as Minev will be forced to sell his stake in FIBank.
Another of Democratic Bulgaria’s leaders, Hristo Ivanov, a former justice minister who resigned when the government watered down its anti- corruption strategy, said that the EU will start serious stress tests of Bulgarian banks and the “rotten apples” will become visible, which, he claimed, have been covered up by Bulgaria’s central bank.
There were already signs that FIBank was in trouble. The latest asset quality review (AQR) and stress test of the banks in Bulgaria, carried out in 2016, named Fibank as one of two banks that needed to build up additional capital buffers.
est political crisis in recent history, with none of the parties in the new parliament able to form
a coalition. President Borut Pahor has given the mandate to form a new government to Janez Jansa, whose Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) won the largest number of votes, but there is no indication yet that he can gain sufficient support to set up a cabinet. For the foreseeable future,