The Competition Council has closed the investigation on banking and interbank services market

The Competition Council has closed the investigation on a possible agreement among companies active on bank and interbank services market in Romania. During the investigation, in the context of malfunction of money market, there was analyzed, mainly, the banks’ behavior in setting ROBID/ROBOR money market indexes during October-November 2008.

The banks investigated were the following: Romanian Commercial Bank SA, BRD-Groupe Societe Generale SA, CEC Bank SA, UniCredit Tiriac Bank SA, Transilvania Bank SA, Raiffeisen Bank SA, ING Bank NV Bucharest Branch, Eximbank Romania SA, RBS Bank (Romania) SA, Bancpost.

Given the importance of ROBID/ROBOR indexes at the level of financial products (deposits, loans), the competition authority pays a special attention to their setting mechanism from the perspective of compliance with competition rules.

In this context, the Competition Council notes that the exchange of confidential commercial information among competitors may represent infringement of the Competition Law.

We remind that during the investigation, the competition authority applied two procedural sanctions to BRD- Groupe Societe Generale SA and Raiffeisen Bank SA (Ron 14 million) for refusal the dawn raids and for submission of inaccurate information. The two banks have challenged in court the fines imposed by Competition Council.

In Raiffeisen case, the Bucharest Court by final judgment found that the bank did not provide the information requested and reduced the fine from 0.7% to 0.4% out of the bank’s turnover. In the BRD case, the litigation is ongoing.

April 2013

Press Office Tel: 0372.129.710, 021.405.44.29 ; E-mail: [email protected]