Today’s Diario Libre editorial, Monday 1 December 2014, focuses on the consequences of the government appointing politicians to key financial supervisory posts. The column mentions the cases of the Superintendence of Insurance under Euclides Gutierrez Felix and the Superintendence of Banks under Luis Armando Asuncion Alvarez.
Last week, in what should have been a thing of the past, the Banco Peravia collapsed, the foreign owners left the country and depositors were affected by the crash.
Adriano Miguel Tejada writes that the Superintendence of Insurance admitted that the company had been intervened in August, but the situation was not made public. In the case of Banco Peravia, the authorities’ slow reaction time allowed the people in charge of the bank to leave the country and evade justice.
“One of the serious problems of supervision in our country is that it places the interests of the system and the high-ranking executives above those of the depositors. In some cases, due to the links of complicity that are created, and in others for believing that they are doing a service to the system by hiding realities that will become public sooner or later,” he writes.
In his conclusion, he states: “It goes against common sense to place politicians in positions of that sort of responsibility. They do not think as supervisors, but as politicians.”
Asuncion Alvarez is a graduate of the O&M University Accounting School. He lists being a member of the ruling PLD party Central Committee on his biography on the Superintendence of Banks website. Superintendent of Insurance Euclides Gutierrez Felix is a member of the PLD political and central committees.
El Dia reports that the Banco Peravia case is at a standstill while National District prosecutors await a technical report by the Superintendence of Bank. Several complaints against bank president Jose Luis Santoro Castellano and vice president Gabriel Arturo Jimenez Aray have been already placed at the prosecutor’s office. Both men have left the country.
http://www.diariolibre.com/opinion/2014/12/01/i906971_supervisin-polticos.html
http://www.sb.gob.do/perfil-del-superintendente