Credit fraud / Bank of Albania revokes the license of "Micro Credit Albania" and "Final"

2024-05-23 22:02:00, Aktualitet CNA

Credit fraud / Bank of Albania revokes the license of "Micro Credit

The Bank of Albania

The Bank of Albania has revoked the licenses of two financial entities "Final" sh.pk and "Micro Credit Albania" sh.pk. The license of the latter was suspended at the end of December 2023.

The decision was taken by the Governor of the Bank of Albania, Gent Sejko.

The Bank of Albania says that "Final" and "Micro Credit Albania" no longer meet the conditions under which they were licensed.

According to her, the partners of the two financial entities no longer meet the criterion of high ethical reputation, as they have an arrest warrant from the Court of Tirana.

"Through this announcement, we inform you that the Bank of Albania, today, on 23.5.2024, has made a decision to revoke the licenses of two non-banking financial entities, namely license no. 11, dated 20.2.2009 of the company "Final" sh.pk and license no. 38 dated 9.5.2016 of the company "Micro Credit Albania" sh.pk, already suspended by decision no. 644, dated 6.2.2024.

The decision-making of the Bank of Albania is based on the legal and regulatory provisions in force that regulate the activity of non-banking financial entities, which foresee, among other things, the cases of license revocations when the licensed entities no longer meet the conditions on the basis of which they are licensed.

In the aforementioned cases, for the partners of both companies whose license was revoked, at the request of the Prosecutor's Office, the measure of arrest was imposed by the Court of First Instance, Tirana, and we are in the conditions where they no longer meet the criterion of high ethical reputation , which, among other things, considers that the individual is not under criminal prosecution, in trial for criminal offenses and criminally convicted.

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Also, the Bank of Albania is addressing the legal and regulatory framework related to the ongoing administration of the client portfolios of the "Final" and "Micro Credit Albania" companies.

The Bank of Albania will issue a second announcement to provide full clarifications to all interested customers on how the loan portfolios of these two entities will be handled in the future," the Bank of Albania's announcement states.

CNA has previously denounced the fraud scheme with lending by microfinance companies.

The scheme was used on various borrowers, who turned out to be victims of the theft of their property, causing a very high economic damage to these citizens or private and public entities./ CNA