Banks are more exchange houses than lenders, says businessman Ioan Niculae, the president of the Union the Council of Romanian Investors, who says that in the last few years, the relationship between banks and companies has "devolved".
He said: "During the economic crisis, both Romania, as well as other countries have used up a large chunk of the money from the IMF and the World Bank. Banks aren't helping the Romanian economy in any way, they are more like exchange houses than lenders. Businesspeople are wasting their time with them".
According to Mr. Ioan Niculae, at the moment, the most frequently encountered forms of lending is the intragroup lending, with companies which belong to the same corporation lending to each other. To a lower extent, companies resort to foreign banks. On our market, there are at most two banks that get involved, to a small extent, in the restructuring of companies, the businessman said.
* Blănculescu: "The banking system is paying the price of its recklessness"
The Romanian banking system is paying the price of its recklessness, says Ionel Blănculescu, honorary advisor of prime-minister Victor Ponta. "When it comes to the banking system, there are three stages in its evolution. Until September 2008, there was the stage of bank recklessness, where banks were eager to grant as many loans as possible, reaching a very high exposure, to all sorts of projects. In the second stage, between September 2008 and until last year, it was found that the level of non-performing loans reached an incredible amount for a country such as Romania. During these years, the crisis was felt by the environmental sector, and banks were unable to deal with the blow. We can say that, for banking institutions, this was the period of indifference, which led to restructurings, contractions etc. The third stage, which began in 2012 and will end
