Negritoiu, ING: Clients With More Than EUR100,000 In A Bank Are Investors, Not Depositors

04.05.2013 By Razvan Voican

Clients who hold deposits of over EUR100,000 are more likely to be investors than simple depositors, and they should have been aware of the risks they were taking when investing in Cypriot banks, says Misu Negritoiu, chairman of ING Bank Romania.

Clients who hold deposits of over EUR100,000 in Bank of Cyprus Romania can rather be likened to investors who went after a yield and took a risk, rather than to the wide majority of depositors. There is no rational basis to extrapolate the experience of this narrow group to what happens in other banks and much less to the overall banking system, says Misu Negritoiu, who ran the local branch of ING Bank for six years.

“There is too much talk of depositors who hold more than EUR100,000.

Ultimately we are talking about knowledgeable clients – according to Romanian standards EUR100,000 is a small fortune. If you keep more than EUR100,000 in a bank you are no longer a simple depositor, you are an investor,” says the banker.

He says on a market with around 8 million clients the situation of the 12,000 clients with more than EUR100,000 is not relevant and the discussion about unsecured deposits is pointless in Romania as long as most deposits are below this level.

“Those who take their money to Cyprus, Switzerland or Luxembourg or those who take it to Germany know why they do it. They are aware of what is at stake, they have to know what to expect depending on their aim. If you put your money in the Romanian branch of Bank of Cyprus it’s as though you would put it in Cyprus, and those who went to Cyprus went there for the interest rate, that’s precisely why they didn’t go to Switzerland,” says Negritoiu, commenting on the situation created after the Cyprus banking crisis. At the beginning of this week the local branch of Bank of Cyprus suspended its operations for a week starting Monday.

ING Romania also operates as a branch, but Negritoiu says there is no comparison between a branch with EUR3.7 billion in its balance sheets, such as ING, and one with EUR600 million, as is the case of Bank of Cyprus, just as there is no comparison between the force of the Dutch state and that of Cyprus.

“We belong to a bank which has an A rating from all three major agencies, Netherland’s central bank oversees the ING group and its Romanian branch just as cautiously as BNR supervises the banks registered as branches and I imagine the Dutch guarantee system works at least as well as the Romanian system.”

ING was salvaged in 2008 by the Dutch state with EUR10 billion, i.e. the entire amount that has now been negotiated for Cyprus’s rescue.

(English version by Daniela Stoican)