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President of the National Consumer Protection Authority (ANPC) Horia Constantinescu announced on Wednesday having signed 11 orders to stop deceptive practices by banks, and that another 8 banks would be sanctioned in the next period.
"The relevant ANPC documents are being challenged in court and this is the only way by which, perhaps, they can be debated, after they have been signed and lodged based on the control documents drawn up, including at the proposal of our colleagues. Yesterday I signed the 11 orders to cease deceptive commercial practices and we will definitely send them to the media as a sui generis body of documents, because we cannot send each of the orders issued to the press, but everything they contain, with certainty yes," Horia Constantinescu told a debate organized at the institution's headquarters.
In his turn, ANPC general director Paul Anghel said that the rest of the orders will be signed in the next period.
The ANPC recently fined eleven banks operating in Romania for applying misleading commercial practices in the installment calculation method.
"ANPC has identified misleading commercial practices in the way the banking economic operators were calculating installments, due to the fact that on the repayment schedule, in the first years, the installment was 25 percent principal and 75 percent interest. Due to this method of calculation, the borrowers were in fact paying mainly interest. For the contractual balance to be restored, in addition to the sanction, i.e. 11 fines in the amount of 550,000 RON, the ANPC commissioners proposed the issue of new repayment schedules for both loans in progress, and future ones, where the principal amount of the loan shall be repaid in equal installments, over the entire lending period, calculated against the loan interest," Anghel stated for AGERPRES.
The 11 banks are: ING Bank, First Bank, Credite Europe Bank, OTP Bank, Alpha Bank, Banca Transilvania, Raiffeisen Bank, BCR, Patria Bank, Unicredit Bank, BRD Groupe Societe Generale.
